SOME  LETTERS  OF 

William 


*r^—*s^ 


1869-1910 


/; 


SOME  LETTERS 

OF 

^tlltatn 


EDITED  WITH  AN   INTRODUCTION 

BY 
DANIEL  GREGORY   MASON 


BOSTON    AND    NEW   YORK 
HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

«£$  Cambribge 
1913 


COPYRIGHT,   1913,   BY  DANIEL  GREGORY  MASON 
ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED 

Published  October  IQI$ 


;  /CD) 
M 

13)3 


INTRODUCTION 


UHE  liberates  the  imagination  with  his  prose," 
wrote  one  of  Moody 's  friends  when  the  project  of  col 
lecting  some  of  the  letters  was  being  discussed,  "as 
effectively  as  he  does  with  his  poetry.  And  then  besides 
there  is  the  luminous  personality  which  emerges  from 
every  folded  sheet,  looking  out  with  large  veiled  eyes." 
The  comment  happily  describes  the  double  interest  of 
these  letters.  They  are,  first  of  all,  literature,  and  may 
be  read,  by  those  who  know  nothing  of  the  personality 
of  their  author,  for  their  purely  literary  charm,  their 
power  to  "liberate  the  imagination."  They  carry,  like 
his  poetry,  for  such  a  reader,  their  own  rich  gifts 
of  delight;  they  are  as  magnanimously  conceived,-  as 
hauntingly  phrased,  as  eloquently  and  ingeniously 
clothed  in  metaphor,  even  more  mischievously  touched 
with  humor.  Moody's  poetry  is  destined,  surely,  to  a 
high,  if  not  to  the  supreme,  place  in  the  American 
poetry  of  his  generation.  His  letters*,  it  seems  to  me, 
are  worthy  to  stand  beside  it;  and  there,  so  far  as  their 
purely  literary  quality  is  concerned,  they  may  be  left 
without  further  comment. 

But  like  all  good  letters  they  are  not  only  literature 
but  self-revelation;  and  the  clear  vision  of  this  more 
individual  element  may  be  helped  not  only  by  the 
large  illumination  shed  upon  them  from  the  poetry, 
but  by  the  countless  casual  side-lights  that  only  per- 

v 


263807 


INTRODUCTION 

sonal  acquaintance  can  note  and  interpret.  The  two 
or  three  essential  qualities  of  Moody's  mind  were 
singularly  persistent  and  ubiquitous,  and  like  the  few 
geologic  strata  that  may  underlie  the  most  varied 
landscape,  cropped  out  in  his  careless  talk  as  unmis 
takably  as  in  his  poems  or  letters.  His  spiritual  earn 
estness,  for  example,  made  him  as  indifferent  to  the 
merely  conventional  aspects  of  life  as  he  was  passion 
ately  curious  about  its  essential  structure.  In  his 
poetry  he  avoided  superficial  detail,  to  penetrate  at 
once  to  essences.  In  his  letters  he  often  exasperatingly 
withheld  the  petty  facts  of  which  most  correspondence 
consists,  but  was  always  frank  and  full  in  the  reve 
lation  of  mood.  Similarly  in  everyday  intercourse  he 
combined  intellectual  candor  and  personal  reserve  in  a 
way  that  many  found  bewildering.  For  his  friends  the 
paradox  was  symbolised  in  his  eyes.  In  their  liquidness 
and  transparence,  in  their  steadfastness  and  quietude, 
they  seemed  to  open  up  quite  fearlessly  a  way  to  his 
deepest  thoughts.  Beautiful  serene  eyes  they  were, 
telling  all  that  mattered  but  ignoring  the  trivial  and 
the  irrelevant:  it  was  as  if  he  had  both  the  honesty 
and  the  shyness  of  a  child.  This  is  perhaps  what 
his  friend  means  when  he  speaks  of  his  personality 
"emerging  from  every  folded  sheet,  with  large  veiled 
eyes." 

Akin  to  the  serenity  of  his  gaze,  and  like  it  a  little 
embarrassing  on  first  acquaintance  but  endlessly  re 
freshing  to  riper  friendship,  was  his  constitutional 
taciturnity.  It  used  to  be  said  of  him  in  college  that 

vi 


INTRODUCTION 

"It  took  Moody  a  pipeful  to  make  a  remark"  — and 
the  discerning  added  that  it  was  worth  while  to  wait. 
When  I  first  met  him,  in  the  spring  of  1894,  during  his 
instructorship  in  the  English  Department  at  Harvard, 
his  manner  was  shy  and  somewhat  self-consciously 
awkward,  so  that  we  undergraduates  of  a  complacent 
local  clique  found  it  easy  to  dismiss  him  as  ''Western." 
An  odd  blend  of  floridity  and  negligence  about  him 
offended  those  whose  ideal  of  manliness  was  a  correct 
dandyism.  And  in  his  physical  being  there  was  indeed 
a  sort  of  rough  homeliness  that  made  the  epithet  to  a 
certain  extent  descriptive.  But  it  did  not  take  long  to 
pass  that  stage,  to  find  that  he  had  also  the  freshness 
and  magnanimity  of  the  West,  and  that  he  saw  things 
under  wider  horizons  than  those  of  the  Cambridge 
tea-tables.  Above  all,  one  discovered  the  richness  of 
his  silences.  He  had  a  way  of  slightly  knitting  his 
brows,  as  if  taking,  from  under  half-closed  lids,  a  bird's- 
eye  view  of  the  broadest  possible  stretch  of  his  subject, 
while  he  communed  with  his  pipe,  frequently  pressing 
down  the  tobacco  with  a  forefinger  long  inured  to  that 
service,  and  finally  producing  a  brief  comment,  usually 
metaphorical  and  often  madly  exaggerative,  that  lib 
erated  the  mind  more  than  floods  of  ordinary  talk.  It 
was  as  if,  instead  of  dissipating  the  thought  supply  as 
most  talkers  do,  churning  it  up  into  a  froth  that  gives 
only  an  illusion  of  increased  substance,  he  was  engaged 
in  a  quiet  husbanding  of  truth,  whereby  it  rose  to 
higher  levels  in  the  reservoir.  He  gave  one  always  a 
sense  of  increased  insight,  of  renewed  confidence,  of 

vii 


INTRODUCTION 

a  deeper  and  truer  conspectus  of  things  than  that  of 
everyday  observation. 

The  liberating  effect  of  his  talk  must  have  been  due 
in  no  small  degree  to  its  vividly  figurative  quality.  No 
matter  to  what  extent  one  might  have  been  led  to 
expect  this  by  the  luxuriance  of  figure  characteristic  of 
his  poetry,  one  could  not  but  be  struck  afresh  on  each 
occasion,  by  the  surprising  variety,  the  ingenious  com 
plexity,  and  often  the  droll  incongruity,  of  the  meta 
phors  that  he  would  constantly  strike  out  in  the  heat 
of  conversation,  mould  with  loving  care  for  a.  moment, 
and  then  toss  aside.  The  letters,  too,  it  will  be  found, 
owe  much  of  their  individuality  of  flavor  to  a  use  of 
figure  at  once  whimsical  and  persistently  logical.  Who 
but  Moody  would  have  thought  of  comparing  himself 
to  a  bicycle  in  such  elaborate  detail  as  this:  " Good  fun, 
but  rather  hard  on  one's  tire.  I  hasten  to  assure  you 
that  I  am  as  yet  unpunctured,  though  much  worn  at 
the  rim,  and  rapidly  losing  resiliency  by  leakage.  I 
relinquish  the  figure  with  reluctance."  On  another 
occasion,  trying  to  solace  a  friend  incapacitated  for 
work,  he  lets  himself  be  beguiled  into  some  charming 
variations  on  the  old  theme,  "The  dark  cellar  ripens 
the  wine."  "And  meanwhile,"  he  says,  "after  one's 
eyes  get  used  to  the  dirty  light,  and  one's  feet  to  the 
mildew,  a  cellar  has  its  compensations.  I  have  found 
beetles  of  the  most  interesting  proclivities,  mice  alto 
gether  comradely  and  persuadable,  and  forgotten 
potatoes  that  sprouted  toward  the  crack  of  sunshine 
with  a  wan  maiden  grace  not  seen  above."  But  the 

viii 


INTRODUCTION 

most  irresistible  instance,  in  all  the  letters,  of  this 
peculiarly  Moody-esque  pursuit,  with  meticulous  logic, 
of  a  more  or  less  absurd  metaphor,  occurs  in  a  letter  to 
Mrs.  Toy  in  which  he  hits  off  once  for  all  that  contrast 
between  East  and  West  which  was  always  haunting 
him.  "  I  am  eager,"  he  writes,  "for  the  queer  inimitable 
charm  of  Cambridge,  for  that  atmosphere  of  mind  at 
once  so  impersonal  and  so  warm,  for  that  neatness  and 
decency  of  you  children,  who  have  been  washed  and 
dressed  and  sent  to  play  on  the  front  lawn  of  time  by 
old  auntie  Ding-an-sich,  while  we  hoodlums  contend 
with  the  goat  for  tomato  cans  in  the  alley.  I  have  a 
fair  line  of  the  same  to  lay  before  your  eyes  when  I 
am  admitted  inside  the  aristocratic  front  gate:  some 
of  them  will  make  a  fine  effect  in  a  ring  around  your 
geranium  bed." 

Conceive  this  vigorous  image-making  faculty  irre 
sponsibly  applied  to  the  thousand  and  one  subjects  of 
casual  talk;  conceive  it  stimulated  by  the  enthusiasm 
of  youthful  comradeships,  and  invited  by  the  endless 
leisure  of  vagrant  country  walks  in  spring,  or  of  long 
winter  evenings  spent  toasting  before  an  open-grate 
fire,  in  an  atmosphere  of  tobacco  smoke  and  hot  rum 
toddy;  conceive  it  returning  upon  itself  at  will,  and 
constructing  day  by  day  a  special  cosmogony  and 
vocabulary  of  its  own.  One  such  winter  evening  I  shall 
never  forget,  when  in  the  small  hours  the  talk  grew 
youthfully  philosophic,  and  Moody,  his  ever  ruddy 
face  flushed  with  the  excitement  of  improvisation, 
leaning  out  from  swirls  of  smoke  and  emphasizing  his 

ix 


INTRODUCTION 

points  with  outstretched  pipe,  drew  a  picture  of  man 
in  the  universe  as  a  frog  in  a  well,  condemned  always 
to  darkness,  destined  never  to  know  what  was  in  the 
world  above.  I  dare  say  it  was  only  warmed-over 
Kantianism ;  certainly  the  toddy  contributed  much  to 
its  impressiveness ;  but  when  the  rich  cadences  of  his 
voice  died  away  it  was  to  a  solemn  silence,  with  the 
two  youthful  philosophers  thoroughly  awed  at  their 
own  imaginings. 

Something  of  the  same  solemnity  that  invests  that 
image  of  the  frog  in  the  well  hangs  about  certain  other 
conceptions  that  acquired  for  us,  chiefly  from  Moody's 
eloquence,  a  largely  representative  value.  "It,"  for 
example,  referred  to  in  the  letters,  transcends  the  ex 
planation  it  seems  to  require,  because  it  both  denotes 
something  so  indefinable,  and  connotes  something  so 
incommunicable.  "  It  "  is  everything,  taken  together, 
that  may  be  the  object  of  a  youthful  idealist's  devotion ; 
it  is  the  sum  total  of  all  that  is  beautiful  and  worthy  of 
loyalty  in  the  world ;  it  is  what  it  is  happiness  to  remem 
ber,  wretchedness  to  forget.  A  "diastole,"  also  men 
tioned  in  the  letters,  is  a  mood  in  which,  so  to  speak, 
the  spiritual  circulation  is  good  (the  figure  is,  of  course, 
drawn  from  the  physiology  of  the  heart) ;  it  is  a  mood  of 
vitality,  of  realization,  of  fulfilment.  Such  moods  we 
made  it  a  point  of  honor,  as  well  as  a  privilege,  to  cele 
brate  by  communication.  Systoles  we  may  also  have 
experienced,  but  usually  we  had  the  courage  not  to 
talk  about  them.  The  most  curious  term  of  all,  nam 
ing  a  type  of  humanity  rather  than  a  general  idea,  was 


INTRODUCTION 

"Pritchard"  —  originally  the  name  of  a  young  work 
ing-man  we  met  one  evening  during  one  of  our  long 
aimless  walks.  In  some  occult  way  he  typified  for  us 
Philistinism  —  all  the  dull,  prosaic  world  which  was 
our  enemy.  In  some  still  more  occult  way  (though 
possibly  cocktails  had  something  to  do  with  it)  he 
mystically  blossomed  into  one  of  the  elect.  From  that 
time  forth,  "Pritchard"  was  for  us  the  divinity  in  the 
average  man. 

Crudely  youthful  as  were  some  of  these  notions  and 
formulations,  they  played  a  genuine  part  in  Moody's 
development,  and  reverberations  of  them  may  be 
caught  by  the  attentive  ear  throughout  his  poems  and 
letters.  They  were  at  any  rate  generous,  and  sprang 
from  a  fine  idealistic  enthusiasm.  Moreover,  they 
illustrate,  in  their  persistent  tendency  to  take  on  figu 
rative  form,  what  one  comes  finally  to  consider  the 
fundamental  quality  of  his  mind.  Metaphor  was  his^ 
natural  mode  of  expression.  It  occurred  to  him  as 
spontaneously  for  a  capricious  snap-shot  at  everyday 
life  as  for  the  more  deliberate  description  in  a  letter  or 
for  the  noble  setting-forth  of  his  poetic  dramas.  Its 
manifestations  in  casual  talk  had  one  element  of  charm 
peculiarly  their  own.  One  does  not  get,  alas,  in  the 
poetry,  or  even  in  the  letters,  the  comment  of  personal 
gesture  and  inflection  on  these  crowding  figments  of 
his  fancy:  the  gathering  amusement  in  his  eyes  as  he 
elaborated  some  conceit;  the  portentous  seriousness 
with  which  he  brought  forth  his  exaggerations  or  absur 
dities;  the  final  bursting  shout  of  laughter,  when  the 

xi 


INTRODUCTION 

dam  gave  way,  that  shook  his  whole  frame  with  its 
physical  gusto. 

The  distinctive  trait  of  his  mind  was  thus,  I  have 
always  thought,  rather  its  imaginative  power  than  its 
purely  intellectual  scope  or  subtlety:  he  was  far  more 
poet  than  philosopher.    There  is  in  his  books,  to  be 
sure,  even  though  it  be  obscured  sometimes,  especially 
in  the  prose  plays,  by  touches  of  sentimentalism,  a 
wisdom  both  noble  and  broad ;  in  daily  intercourse  one 
loved  the  sweetness  and  sanity  of  his  mind  quite  as 
much  as  one  admired  its  bold  constructiveness ;  and 
his  imagination  itself,  however  untrammeled,  owed 
much  of  its  vigor  to  a  kind  of  tenacious  consecutiveness 
akin  to  logic.    Nevertheless  must  one  insist  that  he 
characteristically  saw  the  world  not  from  the  detachecf^ 
point  of  view  of  philosophy,  and  under  its  cold,  evenv 
illumination,  but  rather  as  a  ^glowing  Jocus  where  the  p- 
rays  of  passionate  sympathetic  interest  for  the  moment  J 
converged,  brilliantly  relieved  against  semi-obscurity. 
He  leaned  always  toward  the  extremes  of  statement  in 
which  such  a  vision,  with  its  sharp  chiaroscuro,  natu 
rally  expresses  itself.    He  was  too  eager  in  the  vivid 
presentment  of  what  he  had  felt  intensely  to  linger 
over  peddling  accuracies  of  qualification.    He  seized 
upon  his  subject,  isolated  and  magnified  it.    Many 
amusing  instances  of  his  exaggeration  may  be  found 
in  the  letters.    "There  are  three  hundred  and  twenty- 
three  hand-organs  and  ninety-seven  pianos  on  our 
block,"  he  writes  from    his  New  York   lodgings -in 
1900,   "and  every  hour  thirty-five  thousand  drays 

xii 


INTRODUCTION 

loaded  with  sheet-iron  pass  the  house.  Irving  Place, 
you  know,  is  a  quiet  old-fashioned  neighborhood,  so  we 
are  justly  proud  of  these  slight  evidences  of  anima 
tion."  From  Chicago  he  sends  the  plaint,  during  one 
of  his  periods  of  teaching:  "I  counted  my  vocabulary 
last  night,  and  discovered  it  to  consist  of  ninety-three 
words.  You  shall  have  them  all,  if  you  will  promise 
not  to  be  reckless  with  them."  Such  passages  as  these 
help  us  to  understand  the  over-luxuriance  of  his 
youthful  poetic  style.  If  we  consider,  furthermore, 
that  his  native  tendency  to  extravagance  was  fostered, 
almost  from  the  first,  by  an  acquired  rhetorical  virtu 
osity  the  exercise  of  which  must  have  been  highly  ex 
citing,  we  shall  be  able  to  account  for  the  turgidity  of 
much  of  his  early  verse. 

But  if  both  temperament  and  technical  skill  thus 
inclined  him  rather  toward  romantic  luxuriance  than 
toward  classic  chastity,  only  the  more  remarkable 
becomes  the  tireless  discipline  by  which  he  trained 
himself  to  achieve  the  sobriety  and  distinction  of  such 
later  pieces  as,  say,  the  lyrics  in  "The  Fire-Bringer." 
We  are  reminded  of  Verdi's  progress  from  "11  Trova- 
tore"  to  J'Otello,"  or  Wagner's  from  "  Rienzi"  to  "  Die 
Meistersinger,"  by  a  poet  who  begins  with  rococo  effects 
like 

"  Yet  her  shy  devious  lambent  soul 
With  my  slow  soul  should  walk,"  * 

and  ends  with  such  noble  simplicities  as 

1  See  first  draft  of  "Wilding  Flower,"  page  58. 
xiii 


INTRODUCTION 

"Of  wounds  and  sore  defeat 
I  made  my  battle  stay; 
Winged  sandals  for  my  feet 
I  wove  of  my  delay; 
Of  weariness  and  fear 
I  made  my  shouting  spear; 
Of  loss,  and  doubt,  and  dread, 
And  swift  oncoming  doom, 
I  made  a  helmet  for  my  head 
And  a  floating  plume."  l 

No  one  not  endowed  by  nature  with  a  vivid  imagin 
ation  and  an  eagerly  sympathetic  spirit  could  have 
written  lines  like  these;  but  furthermore,  no  one  thus 
endowed  could  have  written  them,  had  he  not  long 
schooled  himself  in  the  subtle  arts  of  moderation,  just 
emphasis,  and  suggestion.  I  hardly  know  which  the 
more  to  admire  in  Moody  as  a  poet,  the  native  rich 
ness  of  his  mind,  or  the  patient  art  by  which  he  learned 
to  draw  from  it  so  pure  a  harmony. 

The  reader  may  perhaps  welcome,  for  the  insight 
they  give  into  both  qualities,  a  few  more  examples  of 
his  early  work  than  he  decided  to  include  in  the 
"Poems"  of  1901.  What  he  rejected  then,  as  not 
representative  of  his  artistry  at  its  best,  we  may  now 
find  well  worth  study,  as  revealing  something  of  the 
processes  by  which  it  was  attained,  especially  when  we 
can  examine  the  piece  in  the  light  of  his  own  comment, 
as  in  the  case  of  "Wilding  Flower."  "Heart's  Wild- 
Flower,"  as  he  renamed  the  revised  form  of  it  printed 
1  "The  Fire-Bringer,"  Act  I. 
XIV 


INTRODUCTION 

in  the  "Poems,"  is  one  of  his  loveliest  lyrics.  It  suc 
ceeds  in  saying  what  he  considered  to  be  "  a  thing  which 
constitutes  much  of  the  poetry  of  a  young  man's  life," 
and  in  saying  it  not  more  eloquently  than  simply,  with 
much  of  exquisite  music,  and  no  jarring  notes.  With 
this  version  well  in  mind,  turn  to  the  first  draft,  sent 
with  the  letter  of  May  16,  I896,1  and  examine  it  in 
some  detail.  First  of  all  may  be  noted  so  apparently 
trivial  a  matter  as  the  way  of  printing  the  stanza :  six 
short  verses  in  the  earlier  form,  three  long  ones  in  the 
later.  The  short  verses  break  the  free  sweep  of  the 
rhythm.  In  many  places  the  difference  may  be  negli 
gible,  but  at  the  end  of  the  next  to  the  last  stanza,  for 
example,  the  wondrous  charm  of  the  rhythm  is  much 
enhanced  by  printing  all  in  one  line 

"Awes,  adorations,  songs  of  ruth,  hesitancies,  and  tears." 

Secondly,  the  author  has  ruthlessly  deleted  stanzas 
ll-vin  of  the  original  version  —  more  than  half  of  the 
entire  poem.  So  heroic  an  amputation  was  necessitated 
chiefly  by  the  obscurity  of  the  suspended  construction 
in  stanzas  iv-vi,  which  he  admitted  only  after  consid 
erable  argument,  and  reluctantly,  as  will  be  seen  from 
the  letter  of  June  23.  Indeed,  as  in  most  revisions, 
there  was  here  a  loss  as  well  as  a  gain ;  for  he  was  quite 
right  in  pointing  out  the  effect  of  "  breathlessness  and 
holding  aloof"  secured  by  the  suspension,  and  in  com 
paring  its  constructive  value  to  that  of  an  organ  point 
in  music.  The  omission  of  stanza  in  also  sacrifices  the 
1  Page  56. 

XV 


INTRODUCTION 

delicate  preparation  it  made  for  the  final  stanza.  But 
sacrifices  are  not  sacrifices  unless  they  cost  something, 
and  skillful  revision  consists  precisely  in  this  wise 
balancing  of  complex  accounts.  It  was  worth  while  at 
almost  any  price  to  get  rid  of  the  "flushed  adventur 
ous  violins,"  "the  tower  noon-precipiced,"  and  the 
"aching  oboe  throat  that  twins  Night's  moon  ward 
melodist,"  which  are  the  youthful  Moody  at  his 
worst. 

In  the  third  place,  the  substitutions  made  in  the 
retained  stanzas  are  all  noteworthy,  most  of  them 
because  they  tend  toward  simplicity.  Such,  for  in 
stance,  are  "spirit  fire"  for  "lilac  fire,"  "crown  of 
tears  and  flame"  for  "carcanet  of  flame,"  "autumn 
woe"  for  "subtle  woe,"  "a  little  gift"  for  "a  mystic 
gift,"  and  the  poignant  "shy,  shy  wilding  flowers"  for 
the  rather  literary  "lovesome  wilding  flowers."  Most 
interesting  of  all,  however,  are  the  alterations  in  the 
third  stanza  of  the  present  version,  as  not  merely 
verbal  but  affecting  the  conception  itself,  toning  it 
down  from  the  extreme  and  acrid  terms  into  which 
Moody 's  instinct  for  potent  expression  had  led  him, 
into  much  juster,  tenderer  ones. 

"Not  such  a  sign  as  women  wear 
Who  bow  beneath  the  shame 
Of  marriage  insolence,  and  bear 
A  housewife's  faded  name"  — 

which  exaggerates  the  contrast  and  repels  us  by  its 
harshness,  becomes  — 

xvi 


INTRODUCTION 

"Not  such  a  sign  as  women  wear  who  make  their  foreheads 

tame 

With  life's  long  tolerance,  and  bear  love's  sweetest,  humblest 
name." 

Here  the  rhetorical  antithesis  remains  unimpaired, 
and  there  is  a  marked  gain  in  spiritual  propriety,  and 
consequently  in  artistic  dignity. 

Finally  it  is  well  to  note,  after  we  have  made  all 
possible  criticism  of  this  first  draft  on  the  scores  of 
obscurity  of  construction,  turgidity  of  thought,  or 
intemperance  of  language,  that  these  are  after  all  the 
faults  of  excess  rather  than  of  defect,  and  that  in  spite 
of  them,  and  in  some  degree  even  because  of  them,  the 
mind  at  work  here  shows  itself  to  be  thoroughly  alive. 
If  it  has  the  crudity,  it  has  also  the  teeming  vitality  of 
youth.  Its  exuberance  is  infinitely  to  be  preferred  to  the 
pallid  correctness  of  academicism.  Its  mistakes  are 
those  of  a  generous,  independent  nature  daring  enough 
to  attempt  something  new,  and  its  failures  are  of  the 
inspiring  kind  that  in  all  artistic  paths  pave  the  way  to 
future  successes.  One  is  glad  to  think  that  even  in  his 
moments  of  discouragement  he  had  the  pioneer's  sus 
taining  sense  of  adventure  and  discovery,  as  when  he 
writes:  "  I  think  —  pardon  the  egotism  of  the  utterance 
(you  would  if  you  knew  what  tears  of  failure  have  gone 
to  water  the  obstreperous  little  plant)  —  I  think  you 
are  not  tolerant  enough  of  the  instinct  for  conquest  in 
language,  the  attempt  to  push  out  its  boundaries,  to 
win  for  it  continually  some  new  swiftness,  some  rare 
compression,  to  distil  from  it  a  more  opaline  drop. 

xvii 


INTRODUCTION 

Is  n't  it  possible,  too,  to  be  pedantic  in  the  demand  for 
simplicity?  It's  a  cry  which,  if  I  notice  aright,  nature 
has  a  jaunty  way  of  disregarding.  Command  a  rose 
bush  in  the  stress  of  June  to  purge  itself;  coerce  a  con 
volvulus  out  of  the  paths  of  catachresis.  Amen!" 

In  this  endeavor,  thus  early  put  before  himself  as  a 
conscious  ideal,  to  win  for  language  "some  new  swift 
ness,  some  rare  compression,"  Moody  found,  as  time 
went  on,  not  only  an  unfailing  interest,  but  an  object 
worthy  his  most  tireless  devotion,  his  most  unswerving 
loyalty :  he  had  the  passion  of  the  old  alchemists  for  the 
distillation  of  that  "more  opaline  drop."  Impatient  as 
he  might  be  of  the  drudgery  of  teaching  or  hack- 
writing,  in  his  poetic  work  no  labor  could  dismay  him. 
He  loved  to  take  pains.  I  especially  remember  the  trick 
he  had,  in  his  rough  drafts,  of  making  endless  substitu 
tions  of  words,  choosing  first  one  and  then  another, 
striking  out  each  in  turn  and  surmounting  it  with  the 
next,  until  some  of  his  lines  looked  like  the  pediments 
of  ruined  temples,  with  columns  of  words  rising  at 
irregular  intervals  to  unequal  heights.  To  find  him  in 
his  studio  on  a  working  morning  (if  one  had  the  temer 
ity),  in  a  cloud  of  tobacco  smoke,  threading  a  labyrinth 
of  emendations,  surrounded  by  the  carnage  of  previous 
encounters  —  burnt  matches,  scattered  ashes,  and 
discarded  sheets  —  was  to  conceive  a  new  respect  for 
an  art  which  could  so  completely  conceal  itself.  His 
production  was  necessarily  slow.  The  "Masque  of 
Judgment,"  for  example,  was  begun  in  the  summer  of 
1897,  written  out  in  fragmentary  shape  a  year  later 

xviii 


INTRODUCTION 

during  the  holiday  in  Italy,  and  elaborated  in  London 
in  the  spring  of  1899  to  twice  its  previous  proportions. 
"There  are,"  he  mentions  in  December  of  that  year, 
"counting  rewriting  and  further  development  here 
and  there,  about  five  hundred  lines  to  be  added."  It 
was  finally  completed  in  Boston  early  in  1900.  "The 
Faith-Healer,"  which  was  not  finished  until  the  last 
year  of  his  life,  1910,  was  begun,  as  the  letters  show, 
fifteen  years  before,  in  December,  1895. 

Some  sense  of  the  devotion  and  the  deliberateness 
with  which  he  wrote  his  poetry  is  necessary  to  an 
understanding  of  his  loathing  for  what  he  calls  in  one 
of  his  early  Chicago  letters  "the  crowd  of  spiteful 
assiduous  nothings  that  keep  me  from  It."  Although 
he  recognized  with  his  usual  fair-mindedness  that  he 
must  pay  his  way  by  teaching  or  some  similar  form  of 
"useful"  work,  and  punctilious  as  he  was  in  the  dis 
charge  of  these  duties,  he  could  not  but  resent  their 
intrusion  on  time  that  he  needed  for  work  of  infinitely 
greater  intrinsic  value.  And  they  not  only  absorbed 
his  time  —  they  dulled  his  mental  edge,  and  when 
long  continued  robbed  him  of  "the  spirit  of  selec 
tion,  the  zest  of  appropriation"  which  is  the  life  of 
an  artist.  Consequently  no  note  is  more  recurrent 
in  the  first  letters  from  Chicago  than  that  of  a  discon 
tent  with  his  new  surroundings  which  was  doubtless 
only  partly  due  to  the  specific  quality  of  the  place,  and 
is  chiefly  to  be  attributed  to  the  distastefulness  of  his 
pursuits  there. 

Indeed  the  comments  on  Chicago,  though  all  inter- 

xix 


INTRODUCTION 

esting,  are  oddly  contradictory,  and  suggest  a  ceaseless 
alternation  of  moods.  The  mere  physical  spaciousness 
of  the  Western  landscape  seems  sometimes  to  have 
oppressed,  sometimes  to  have  excited  him.  "Cam 
bridge,  mellow  and  autumnal,"  he  writes  soon  after 
his  arrival,  "begins  already  to  loom  symbolic,  under 
the  stress  of  this  relentless  prairie  light  and  vast  fea 
tureless  horizon."  Yet,  a  month  later,  "To  be  a  poet," 
he  cries,  "is  a  much  better  thing  than  to  write  poetry 
—  out  here,  at  least,  watched  by  these  wide  horizons, 
beckoned  to  by  these  swift  streamers  of  victorious  sun 
set."  Both  of  these  opposed  moods  are  not  only  ex 
pressed  but  philosophically  penetrated  in  the  beautiful 
letter  of  February  16,  1896,  about  the  Irish  girl  he  met 
skating. 

What  he  called  the  "Western  heartiness  and 
uniplexity"  subjected  him  to  similar  fluctuations  of 
feeling.  "As  for  Chicago,"  he  tells  Mrs.  Toy,  "I  find 
that  it  gives  me  days  or  at  least  hours  of  broad-gauge 
Whitmanesque  enthusiasm,  meagrely  sprinkled  over 
weeks  of  tedium."  In  the  long  run  he  seems  to  have 
felt  the  deprivations  more  than  the  advantages:  "In 
the  East  .  .  .  one  had  n't  to  go  far  before  finding 
some  refinement  of  feeling,  some  delicate  arabesque  of 
convention,  to  help  make  up  for  the  lack  of  liberty. 
Out  here  there  is  even  less  liberty  (because  less  thought) 
and  there  is  nothing  —  or  next  to  nothing  —  to  com 
pensate."  He  describes  in  a  memorable  sentence  of  the 
same  letter  the  deadly  effect  of  such  monotony  on  his 
eagerly  adventurous  mind  —  "  that  awful  hush  settling 

xx 


INTRODUCTION 

down  on  everything,  as  if  To  Hdv  had  suddenly  dis 
covered  himself  to  be  stuffed  with  sawdust." 

The  truth  is,  Moody  was  not  made  to  wear  content 
edly,  anywhere,  the  academic  harness  and  blinders: 
he  was  too  full  of  the  untamable  wildness  of  the  crea 
tive  mind  which  he  has  expressed  so  incomparably  in 
his  "  Road-Hymn  for  the  Start." 

"  Dear  shall  be  the  banquet  table  where  their  singing  spir 
its  press; 
Dearer  be  our  sacred  hunger,  and  our  pilgrim  loneliness." 

No  one  so  insatiably  curious  about  life  as  he  was,  so 
ardent  to  learn,  could  give  himself  with  patience  to 
teaching.  How  many  times  must  he  have  felt  that  im 
pulse  he  confesses  to  "trundle  his  little  instructorial 
droning-gear  into  Lake  Michigan,  and  step  out  west  or 
south  on  the  Open  Road,  a  free  man  by  the  grace  of 
God,  and  a  tramp  by  Rachel's  intercession"!  How 
dead  and  buried  must  he  have  seemed  to  himself  when 
he  computed  in  January,  1898,*^  April  is  only  eighty- 
eight  lectures,  forty  committee  meetings,  and  several 
thousand  themes  away"!  And  how  archly,  a  little 
later,  as  the  months  nevertheless  elapse,  does  he  para 
phrase  Wordsworth:  "My  heart  leaps  up  when  I  be 
hold  a  calendar  on  the  sly  " !  When  the  vacations  do  at 
last  arrive,  and  he  is  free  once  more  to  take  up  his  own 
work,  it  is  exciting  to  read  of  his  joy.  "  I  can  feel  the 
holy  influences  that  wait  on  him  who  loafs  beginning 
to  purge  me  and  urge  me,  though  I  tremble  to  say  so 
for  fear  of  frightening  back  their  shy  inquiring  tenta- 

xxi 


INTRODUCTION 

cles."  "The  summer  I  am  bound  to  have  though  the 
Heavens  fall,  or  rather  because  they  are  not  going  to 
fall  but  remain  as  a  fittingly  modest  framework  for  the 
spectacle  of  my  felicity." 

It  is  worth  while  to  insist  with  some  amplitude  of 
detail  on  the  disharmony  between  Moody's  economic 
conditions  and  his  spiritual  needs,  both  because  his 
resolution  of  the  discord  was  accomplished  with  a  tact 
and  courage  that  reveal  much  of  what  is  finest  in  his 
character,  and  more  generally  because  this  Apollo- 
Admetus  problem  is  fundamental  in  the  life  of  every 
artist,  and  Moody's  example  is  therefore  a  widely 
inspiring  one.  His  friends  could  never  sufficiently 
admire  the  quiet  self-respect  with  which  he  pursued  a 
course  midway  between  the  extremes  where  so  many 
gifted  natures  meet  shipwreck.  In  the  first  place,  he 
was  both  too  honest  and  too  shrewd  to  shirk  his  service 
to  Admetus  —  that  irreducible  minimum  of  it  which 
he  had  decided  to  be  necessary.  He  could  even, 
thanks  to  his  imagination,  take  the  point  of  view  of  the 
task-master,  see  what  was  reasonably  to  be  expected 
of  the  servant,  and  understand  the  fatuity  of  evading 
it.  He  always  fulfilled  his  obligations  to  the  letter. 
When  he  was  working  on  his  "  History  of  English 
Literature,"  for  instance,  at  Gloucester,  in  May,  1900, 
• —  a  month  when  moors  and  sea  are  at  their  most 
seductive,  —  he  may  have  found  it  necessary,  as  he 
whimsically  states,  to  "put  on  blinders,  stuff  his  ears 
with  wax,  and  strap  himself  to  the  desk";  but  at 
least  the  work  done  in  that  constricted  position  was 

xxii 


INTRODUCTION 

solid  and  workmanlike,  as  any  one  may  see  for  him 
self. 

On  the  other  hand,  he  never  forgot  for  a  moment 
that  such  work  was  but  a  means  to  an  end ;  he  never 
tolerated  the  sentimental  fallacy  that  faithfulness  in 
the  treadmill  exempts  one  from  the  higher  responsi 
bilities  of  a  liberal  leisure ;  he  never  gave  Admetus  one 
jot  more  than  was  nominated  in  the  bond.  Thus  he 
refused  the  offer,  from  Chicago  University,  of  the  full 
salary  of  a  professor  for  lectures  during  one  quarter 
each  year:  a  single  quarter  was  too  much.  Of  course 
the  price  of  such  devotion  was  poverty.  His  method 
was  to  labor  at  teaching  or  hack-writing  until  he  had 
accumulated  a  little  money,  and  then  to  live  on  it  as 
simply  as  possible  as  long  as  it  lasted,  too  happy  in 
composition  to  mind  small  discomforts.  That  it  lasted 
longer  in  Europe  than  at  home  was  one  reason  of 
his  frequent  voyages.  Fortunately  he  did  not  need  a 
large  income.  Aside  from  a  barbaric  fondness  for 
jewelry  and  fancy  waistcoats  his  personal  tastes  were 
inexpensive;  though  fond  of  the  society  of  cultivated 
people,  he  had  not  the  least  trace  of  snobbery;  almost 
his  only  financial  luxury  was  the  help  he  often  extended 
to  relatives  and  friends  less  prosperous  than  himself. 
Even  with  these  advantages,  however,  he  showed,  it 
seems  to  me,  a  clear-headedness  in  the  discrimina 
tion  between  immediate  and  ultimate  values,  and  a 
stanch  courage  in  the  refusal  to  let  the  nearer  interfere 
with  the  greater,  as  difficult  to  attain,  and  as  rare,  as 
they  are  admirable  and  worthy  of  emulation. 

xxiii 


INTRODUCTION 

The  entire  freedom  of  his  work  from  the  influences 
of  commercialism,  even  in  its  most  insidious  and  seduc 
tive  forms,  is  due,  I  am  sure,  to  this  faculty  he  had  of 
keeping  money-earning  and  art  as  completely  sepa 
rated  in  his  mind  as  they  are  in  reality.  It  was  placed 
in  such  striking  relief  by  the  circumstances,  unprece 
dented  in  his  hitherto  obscure  life,  surrounding  the 
production  of  "The  Great  Divide"  in  the  autumn  of 
1906  (the  single  decisive  worldly  success  of  his  short 
career)  that  I  remember  vividly  what  he  told  me  of  his 
affairs  during  a  brief  visit  in  the  country  soon  after 
the  opening  night.  He  was  then  earning  about  five 
hundred  dollars  a  week  from  the  play,  and  was 
besieged  by  reporters,  publishers,  managers,  and  gen 
eral  social  invitations.  He  was  also  quite  unspoiled 
by  it  all,  as  simple  in  manner  and  cordial  in  talk  as 
ever,  and  more  enthusiastic  over  the  beauties  of  the 
country  than  over  the  glories  of  Broadway.  In  the 
course  of  a  long  morning  walk  he  told  me  that  he 
hoped  sometime  to  be  able  to  buy  a  farm,  where  he 
could  write  undisturbed,  and  that  now  for  the  first 
time,  among  those  New  England  hills,  he  realized  how 
he  had  been  tempted  by  large  offers,  received  from 
four  different  publishers,  for  "The  Great  Divide"  in 
novel  form.  Such  sums  had  been  mentioned  as  twenty- 
five,  and  even  fifty,  thousand  dollars.  But  it  had  always 
seemed  to  him,  he  said,  that  the  turning  of  a  play  into  a 
novel,  or  vice  versa,  was  a  confounding  of  two  essentially 
diverse  types  of  art,  and  therefore  a  violation  of  a  ba 
sic  artistic  principle ;  and  he  had  refused  all  the  offers. 

xxiv 


INTRODUCTION 

Not  that  there  was  anything  of  the  prig  in  him  — 
his  sympathies  were  far  too  broad  for  that.  The  notes 
in  which  he  discusses  with  Mr.  Gilder  the  suppression 
of  his  initials  on  the  poem  written  in  his  honor  reveal  a 
characteristic  mingling  of  modesty  as  to  his  own  attain 
ments  with  delight  in  the  appreciation  of  others  and 
tender  concern  for  their  feelings.  He  had,  too,  that 
rarest  form  of  humor  which  enables  a  man  to  laugh 
at  himself,  and  an  artist  to  relish  parodies  of  his  own 
style.  We  see  it  in  the  letter  of  January  24,  1901, 
to  Mr.  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson,  in  which  he  plays 
with  the  notion  of  how  his  "florid  vocabulary"  may 
affect  a  brother  poet  of  the  opposed  method,  a  devotee 
of  under-statement.  Even  in  college  days,  when  some 
solemnity  of  egotism  is  almost  the  accepted  attitude, 
he  had  already  this  self-immolating  humor.  A  college 
mate,  I  remember,  used  to  make  fun  of  the  "foolish 
little  cricket  thing"  in  the  song,  "  My  love  is  gone  into 
the  East,"1  and  to  turn  the  third  stanza  into  baldest 
prose  by  the  simple  device  of  changing  "or  late  or 
soon"  into  "sooner  or  later."  That  Moody  may  have 
been  a  little  nettled  as  well  as  amused  is  suggested  by 
his  request, when  he  sent  me  " Dawn  Parley"  a  year  or 
two  later,  that  before  reading  it  I  abstract  myself  for 
twelve  hours  from  the  society  of  the  jester ;  but  all  the 
same  he  thoroughly  enjoyed  the  joke,  and  recurs  to  it 
with  unction  in  his  letter  of  December  I,  1895.  When 
he  was  writing  "Gloucester  Moors,"  at  East  Glouces 
ter,  in  the  spring  of  1900,  he  asked  a  lady  at  the  hotel, 

1  "Poems  and  Plays,"  vol.  I,  p.  151. 
XXV 


INTRODUCTION 

learned  in  wild-flowers,  to  tell  him  the  names  of  all  she 
knew,  and  used  some  of  them  in  the  second  stanza  — 

"Jill  o'er  the  ground  is  purple  blue, 
Blue  is  the  quaker-maid." 

One  item  in  the  catalogue,  baby  blue-eye,  brought 
from  him  a  shout  of  laughter,  and  the  suggestion  that 
it  ought  to  be  incorporated  in  the  line 

"  Baby  blue  is  the  baby  blue-eye." 

In  the  long  run;  and  after  all  analysis,  it  is  Moody's 
broad  humanity  that  stands  out  as  the  most  lovable 
trait  of  the  man  and  the  imperishable  quality  in  the 
poet.  He  accepted  human  nature,  and  glorified  it.  He 
pitied  its  fallibility  and  admired  its  aspiration ;  and  he 
identified  himself  with  it,  frankly  recognizing  in  his 
own  character  the  two  conflicting  elements.  From  one 
of  his  most  serious  letters,  to  a  friend  who  does  not 
wish  it  to  be  published  entire,  the  following  passage 
may  be  taken  as  a  touching  illustration :  — 

"Thanks  for  your  word  of  cheer.  It  found  me  in  a 
state  of  dejection  compounded  of  grippe  and  unfaith 
fulness,  and  lifted  me  to  the  heights  again  —  the  only 
climate  that  suits  my  lungs  these  days,  though  the 
valleys  with  their  lights  and  business  are  tempting 
when  night  sets  in,  and  too  often  betray  me  downward. 
...  I  needed  the  good  word  you  sent  me  more  than  a 
little,  and  am  in  your  debt  a  trifle  deeper  than  before  — 
if  a  matter  of  a  few  thousands  is  worth  counting  in 
my  hopeless  insolvency.  If  my  work,  stumbling  and 

xxvi 


INTRODUCTION 

delayed  as  it  usually  seems  to  me,  gives  you  any  help 
in  the  contemplation,  consider  what  the  candour  and 
spiritual  grace  of  your  character  have  been  and  are  to 
me,  looking  with  eyes  no  less  wistful  after  righteous 
ness  for  being  somewhat  bleared  and  dazzled  by  sen 
suous  strayings.  These  things  are  perhaps  best  left 
unsaid,  but  now  and  then  one  forgets  that  he  is  an 
Anglo-Saxon  and  remembers  only  that  he  is  a  man, 
with  a  man's  eternal  aims,  and  a  man's  chances  of 
help  and  hindrance  on  the  tragic  road ;  for  which  former 
it  is  not  unbecoming  from  time  to  time  to  give  thanks 
somewhat  soberly." 

Such  a  passage  as  this  evokes  for  us  afresh,  and  with 
an  even  more  intimate  sense  of  personal  presence,  the 
generous  nature  that  has  expressed  this  religion  of 
humanity  with  incomparable  power  in  Raphael's 
Jiymn  to  man  in  Act  in  of  the  "  Masque  of  Judgment." 
Deeply  spiritual,  and  as  far  as  possible  removed  from 
the  sensualism  the  thoughtless  have  found  in  it,  is  his 
paganism,  as  there  set  forth,  his  belief  in  the  feelings, 
the  passions,  and  the  senses.  He  conceives  them  all 
as  ministers  of  spirituality,  and  sees  them  transfigured 
in  that  ministration.  He  believes  that  through  them 
alone  is  spirituality  realized,  or  realizable. 

"Not  in  vain,  not  in  vain," 
sings  Raphael,  — 

"The  spirit  hath  its  sanguine  stain, 
And  from  its  senses  five  doth  peer 
As  a  fawn  from  the  green  windows  of  a  wood." 

xxvii 


INTRODUCTION 

To  his  mind  the  only  possible  attitude  was  a  hearty 
acceptance  of  life  as  a  whole.  He  was  an  enemy  of 
nothing  that  is  positive,  but  only  of  the  negative 
things:  doubt,  cowardice,  indifference,  all  ascetic 
denials  of  life.  The  reader  of  the  letters  that  follow 
will,  it  is  hoped,  come  ever  more  clearly  to  recognize  the 
warm-hearted,  welcoming  personality  that  speaks  in 
them.  He  was  one  of  the  few  who  can  use,  in  their 
fullest  sense,  the  words  he  has  put  into  the  mouth  of 
Raphael :  — 

"O  struggler  in  the  mesh 

Of  spirit  and  of  flesh 
Some  subtle  hand  hath  tied  to  make  thee  Man, 

My  bosom  yearns  above  thee  at  the  end, 
Thinking  of  all  thy  gladness,  all  thy  woe; 

Whoever  is  thy  foe, 
I  am  thy  friend,  thy  friend." 

D.  G.  M. 

NEW  YORK,  April,  1913. 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

&fUfam 


SOME    LETTERS    OF 


IN  spite  of  his  habitual  extreme  reticence  about 
personal  and  family  affairs,  Moody  once  confided  to 
me  that  when,  in  the  fall  of  1889,  he  entered  Harvard 
College,  his  entire  capital  consisted  of  twenty-five 
dollars.1  He  was  also  partly  responsible  for  the  support 
of  one  of  his  sisters,  I  believe  ;  though  his  statements 
were  always  so  vague  on  these  points  that  even  after 
knowing  him  years  one  was  never  surprised  at  the 
sudden  cropping  up  in  his  conversation  of  a  hitherto 
uncatalogued  relative.  Certain  it  is  that  he  worked 
hard  at  typewriting,  tutoring,  proctoring,  —  anything 
he  could  find  to  do,  meanwhile  studying  to  such  good 
purpose  that  at  the  end  of  the  third  year  he  had  enough 
points  for  graduation.  He  accordingly  spent  his  senior 
year  abroad,  tutoring  a  boy  in  order  to  earn  his  way. 
It  was  at  this  time  that  he  made  the  first  of  his  many 
visits  to  Greece.  The  winter  he  spent  chiefly  in  Flor 
ence. 

During  his  undergraduate  years  at  Cambridge  he  had 
contributed  some  verse  to  the  Harvard  Monthly,  and 

1  William  Vaughn  Moody  was  born  July  8,  1869,  at  Spencer, 
Indiana. 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

he  continued  these  contributions  during  his  travels 
and  after  his  return  to  Cambridge  as  a  graduate  stu 
dent  and  instructor.  Other  Harvard  Monthly  poets  of 
his  day  were  Philip  Henry  Savage,  also  of  the  class 
of  1893,  Hugh  McCulloch  (1892),  and,  a  little  earlier, 
Dr.  George  Santayana  (1886).  In  the  later  class  of 
1 895  was  graduated  his  friend  Joseph  Trumbull  Stick- 
ney ,  of  whose  posthumous  book  of  poems  he  was  one  of 
the  editors. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

[Sept.  5,  1892.] 
WARWICK.  [ENGLAND.] 
DEAR  ROBERT: 

We  arrived  here  yesterday  (Sept.  4)  after  a 
charming  two  weeks  in  the  Scotch  and  English 
lakes,  and  expect  to  remain  for  ten  days  or  so. 
I  hope  that  you  and  Dow  can  get  in  your  English 
trip  before  we  leave  Warwickshire,  so  that  I  can 
give  you  the  benefit  of  my  accumulated  experience 
in  dealing  with  the  Insolent  Briton  and  in  viewing 
the  historic  monuments  of  his  insolence.  These 
midland  counties  are  excellently  beautiful,  to  use 
Mr.  Howells's  solemn  phrase,  and  beautiful  in  a 
fresh  wide-awake  way  which  will  appeal  to  you 
doubly  after  the  sultry  splendor  of  Italy.  .  .  . 

WILL  M . 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

[PARIS,  October,  1892.] 
DEAR  ROBERT: 

Will  you  add  another  star  to  the  crown  the 
Lord  keeps  for  those  who  waver  not  in  friendship, 
by  receiving  the  package  of  books  which  I  send 
by  this  mail,  paying  the  custom-house  charges  (if 
there  are  any)  and  forwarding  the  package  to  the 
address  below?  .  .  . 

I  hope  to  receive  the  Monthly  regularly.  Am 
sorry  not  to  send  anything  for  the  October  num 
ber.  I  have  turned  Pegasus  out  to  pasture  and  he 
eateth  much  green  grass,  but  inclineth  not  to 
soar.  .  .  . 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

[PARIS,  Nov.  22,  1892.] 
DEAR  ROBERT: 

Please  receive  my  heartfelt  thanks  for  the  tele 
gram,  the  book-fonvarding,  the  rank  list  and  the 
assessment  notice.  .  .  .  After  all  sorts  of  persua 
sion,  physical  and  moral,  the  rank  list  refuses  to 
disgorge  more  than  five  A's  for  me,  which  leaves 
me  with  only  thirteen  and  a  half  toward  a  summa. 
I  fear  even  your  professional  aplomb  will  be 
staggered  by  the  hopelessness  of  the  situation. 

5 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

So  far  I  have  had  little  time  and  no  inclina 
tion  for  study,  but  under  the  sedative  influence 
of  German  beer  and  German  beauties  I  hope  to 
get  my  pulses  down  to  a  pace  where  grinding  will 
be  a  delirious  adventure.  We  have  been  in  Paris 
now  seven  weeks  and  I  have  learned  this  dainty 
Sodom  tolerably  well,  I  flatter  myself.  I  dare  say 
your  fingers  are  reaching  instinctively  after  your 
blue  pencil,  to  put  the  mark  of  eternal  damnation 
on  my  adjective.  But  I  insist  on  dainty.  After 
three  or  four  nights  spent  with  "les  gens  qui 
s'amusent"  in  some  of  the  places  where  a  fortu 
nate  acquaintance  with  a  French  officer  gave  me 
entrance,  I  am  sure  that  never  in  the  history  of 
man  was  the  scarlet  robe  so  delicately  woven  or  of 
so  gossamer  a  texture.  I  send  a  piece  of  verse  — 
for  which,  I  fear,  your  blue  pencil  will  have  the 
same  horrible  affinity.  Read  it  yourself  first  and 
let  not  mercy  season  justice.  If  it  is  printed  I 
should  like  to  have  a  proof  if  possible.  .  .  . 

WILL. 
To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

[DRESDEN:  April  n,  1893.] 
DEAR  ROBERT: 

I  was  overjoyed  to  find  a  letter  from  you  wait 
ing  for  me  in  Dresden,  doubly  so  as  I  had  had  no 

6 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

mail  since  leaving  Italy,  six  weeks  before.  We 
were  unfortunately  prevented  from  accepting  the 
Grand  Llama's  invitation,  but  made  up  for  it  in 
part  by  hobnobbing  with  the  Sultan  in  Constanti 
nople,  the  quality  of  whose  wine  and  rose-leaf 
jelly  is  absolutely  beyond  criticism.  We  had  the 
good  luck  to  strike  some  of  the  Lord's  people  on 
leaving  Italy,  Mr.  Edward  Lowell  and  family, 
and  spent  three  weeks  with  them  in  Greece  — 
three  weeks  of  flawless  enjoyment  for  me,  in  spite 
of  the  resin  in  the  wine  and  the  ubiquitous  prowl 
ing  of  the  Philistine.  After  doing  what  could 
be  easily  done  from  Athens,  —  Eleusis,  Phylae, 
Aegina,  and  Marathon,  —  we  went  down  to 
Nauplia  in  the  Peloponnesus,  and  made  flying 
trips  to  Epidaurus,  Argos  and  Mycenae.  Instead 
of  coming  into  Germany  by  way  of  Triest  we 
chose  the  Aegean  route,  and  spent  a  week  in 
Constantinople,  studying  the  mind  and  manners 
of  ye  sad-eyed  Mussulman.  So  that  my  time  has 
been  pretty  well  taken  up  for  a  long  time,  and 
your  rebuke  on  the  subject  of  letterwriting  is  only 
half  merited,  or  at  least  so  I  try  to  believe  for 
ease  of  conscience  sake.  Two  belated  and  badly- 
battered  Monthlies  have  reached  me  —  the  Octo 
ber  and  January  numbers,  I  think,  but  aside  from 

7 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

this  and  a  newspaper  clipping  now  and  then, 
Harvard  and  her  doings  have  been  pure  conjec 
ture  for  me.  I  am  sorry  not  to  have  been  able  to 
send  anything  for  padding,  but  I  have  had  neither 
time  nor  inclination  to  write.  The  outline  of 
Italian  II  came  to  hand  all  right  and  I  am 
infinitely  obliged.  I  have  put  all  my  spare  time  on 
Dante  so  far,  and  probably  shall  not  try  now  to 
work  up  Sheldon's  course  —  I  have  not  the  nerve 
to  throw  such  sand  in  the  maw  of  the  faculty 
Cerberus,  lest  he  should  turn  and  rend  me. '  These 
days  I  suck  much  milk  from  the  paps  of  the 
Wagner ian  muse,  so  far  without  any  symptoms  of 
spiritual  colic  —  Walktire  and  Tannhauser  last 
week,  with  a  prospect  of  the  whole  Rheingold 
cycle  next.  Your  flashlight  description  of  the 
meeting  of  the  church  in  Laodicea  was  most 
picturesque  and  made  me  horribly  homesick  for 
such  communion  —  whether  God  is  blackballed 
or  not  I  am  a  candidate  for  the  first  vacant  posi 
tion  as  usher  or  organ-boy.  Also  the  Italian 
restaurant  a  la  Luino  wrung  my  bowels  with 
envious  longings  of  a  curious  gastro-psychic 
complexity.  We  sail  from  Genoa  May  24,  and 
shall  be  in  Boston  by  the  5th  or  6th  of  June,  so  that 
I  can  attend  to  everything  but  the  gown,  which  I 

8 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

would  be  glad  if  you  would  order  for  me  according 
to  the  enclosed  measurements.  I  have  applied  for 
a  fellowship  for  next  year,  and  if  I  get  it  shall 
come  back  for  an  indefinite  period.  I  hope  you 
will  be  a  doorkeeper  still,  even  if  Providence 
has  n't  the  good  taste  to  make  you  a  burner 
of  myrrh  before  the  inmost  altars.  ...  I  have 
about  decided  not  to  spread  on  Class-day,  as  it  is 
a  huge  bother  and  being  away  all  year  has  kept 
me  clear  of  social  debts.  Do  you  think  it  advisable 
to  spread  under  the  circumstances?  ...  As  ever, 

WILL. 

Of  Moody 's  undergraduate  verse  there  is  little  if  any 
that  he,  as  an  artist,  would  care  to  have  preserved.  His 
Class  Day  Poem,  however,  called  "The  Song  of  the 
Elder  Brothers,"  has  an  autobiographical  interest  that 
justifies  the  quotation  of  a  few  stanzas  here.  All 
through  his  life  the  contrast  between  the  fresh  vitality 
of  the  west  and  the  mellower  civilization  of  the  east 
exercised  his  imagination ;  as  a  man  he  felt  it  strongly 
in  coming  from  his  Indiana  village  to  Harvard,  and 
later  to  Florence  and  Greece;  as  an  artist  he  tried  at 
various  times  to  picture  it,  notably  in  "The  Great 
Divide."  The  class  day  poem  shows  that  in  his  under 
graduate  years  he  was  already  keenly  aware  of  the 
quality  of  Harvard,  and  what  is  more,  conscious  of  his 
personal  debt  to  its  traditions. 

9 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

The  nucleus  of  the  poem  is  the  song  in  praise  and 
thanksgiving  to  Alma  Mater  which  the  poet  attributes 
to  his  spiritual  "elder  brothers,"  to  all  those  who 
before  him 

"Saw  the  looming  of  the  gates 
That  open  unto  larger  seas, 
Who  heard  the  singing  of  the  breeze 
That  calls  to  sweeter,  lonelier  fates. 


Longfellow,  with  the  blossomed  hair 
And  low-tuned  lyre,  who  sings  alway : 
4  Behind  the  cloud  is  golden  day, 
So  let  us  fare  as  children  fare.' 

And  Emerson,  who  stops  and  hears 
The  pine  trees'  ancient  overtones, 
Who  listens  at  the  hearts  of  stones, 
And  weighs  the  star-dust  and  the  years. 


And  all  the  other  men  who  brought 
Some  message  from  beyond  the  bar 
Of  sense,  where  ever  chime  and  jar 
The  opalescent  seas  of  thought." 

After  describing  the  song  of  these  elder  brothers, 
and  asking  what  answer  we  who  "  kneel  now  before  the 
mother's  face"  shall  send,  he  continues:  — 

"Shall  we  not  say:  'While  sunset  flings 
Through  our  great  hall  its  jewelled  rain, 

10 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

From  windows  blazoned  with  their  train 
Of  poets,  saints,  and  soldier  kings, 

So  long  shall  this  our  college  throw 
Across  the  loud  noon,  bare  and  bright, 
A  jewelled  and  a  sunset  light, 
A  many-ribboned  golden  glow. 

While  Charles's  chivalry  doth  shine 
Upon  the  pane,  her  halls  shall  hold 
Such  hearts  as  gave  up  land  and  gold 
And  went  to  die  in  Palestine. 


So  long  as  Homer  clasps  his  lyre 
Among  us  some  shall  still  be  found, 
About  whose  brows  the  gods  have  wound 
Song's  amaranthine  buds  of  fire. 

While  Shakespeare  waits  and  seems  to  scan 
Each  form  that  passes  in  the  dusk, 
One  here  shall  break  away  the  husk 
Which  hides  the  fruit-sweet  heart  of  man.' 

So  shall  we  answer,  kneeling  low, 
Feeling  the  time  draw  very  near 
To  part,  and  common  things  grow  dear, 
And  things  forgotten  clearer  grow. 

Long,  mellow  twilights  in  the  Yard, 
The  peace  that  settles  from  the  trees, 
The  tinkle  of  guitars,  the  leas 
Of  laughter  dripping  sweet  as  nard ; 
II 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

The  lazy  Charles  at  noon;  the  long 
Salt  meadows;  the  slow  beat  of  oars; 
Faint  cheery  calls;  across  the  moors 
The  great  tower  rising  like  a  song: 

Till  we  can  only  bow  the  head, 
Waiting  the  Mother's  gracious  ken, 
And  reach  across  the  years  to  when 
We,  too,  may  say  as  those  have  said : 

'  Fair  Harvard !  Mother  fair  and  grand ! 
Behold,  we  are  thy  children  too; 
Great  mother  from  whose  breast  we  drew 
The  larger  strength  of  brain  and  hand ! 

Lo,  have  we  borne  a  knightly  sword? 

Thy  kiss  was  misty  on  the  blade ! 

Lo,  men's  hearts  have  we  stirred  and  swayed? 

Thou  puttest  in  our  mouth  the  word! ' " 

The  year  after  his  graduation  Moody  spent  in  study 
at  Cambridge,  eking  out  a  slender  income  by  the 
editorial  labors  on  Bulfinch's  Mythology  with  Mr. 
Lovett  to  which  the  letters  refer,  and  in  other  ways. 
Then  came  a  year  as  instructor  in  English  composition 
under  his  friend  Professor  Lewis  E.  Gates,  and  in  the 
spring  of  1895  the  summons  to  Chicago  University 
which  took  him  thither  in  the  following  fall. 

During  his  two  graduate  years  at  Harvard  he  wrote 
a  good  many  poems,  but  they  were  for  the  most  part 
immature  and  more  or  less  imitative  of  Keats,  Ros- 
setti,  Walt  Whitman,  and  especially  Browning.  Al- 

12 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

though  he  profited  much  from  the  writing  of  them, 
especially  in  his  rhythms,  eventually  so  marvellous  in 
their  subtlety  and  variety,  he  considered  most  of 
them  only  studies,  as  is  shown  by  his  omitting  them 
from  the  "  Poems  "  of  1901. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

DEAR  ROBERT: 

As  you  purpose  returning  so  soon,  I  think  I  will 
not  come  to  Waterville,  as  the  present  stringency 
in  the  money  market  has  at  last  crippled  even  my 
immense  resources.  Do  not  hurry  back  on  Bui- 
finch's  account,  however;  I  will  have  a  general 
supervision  over  Zeus's  amours,  and  will  keep 
Here  out  of  his  hair  until  such  time  as  the  color 
fadeth  out  of  the  Waterville  sky  and  the  dregs 
in  the  wine  cup  grow  bitter.  Till  then,  farewell. 

WILL  M . 

CAMBRIDGE, 
Aug.  10,  1893. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

DEAR  ROB: 

•        •«*...., 

What  became  of  the  Seal  Harbor  Coeducational 
Trust?  I  have  heard  nothing  of  it  and  am  con 
sumed  with  curiosity.  My  two  weeks'  taste  of  the 

13 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

World's  Fake  has  left  upon  my  lips  the  salt  of 
vanities.  I  long  even  for  a  swallow  of  Laodicean 
shaving  water  to  cool  my  tongue.  Hoping  to  in 
dulge  with  you  in  that  mild  beverage  before  long, 

As  ever,  WILL. 

CAMBRIDGE, 
September  17,  1893. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

23  HILTON. 

[CAMBRIDGE,  Feb.  5,  1894.] 
DEAR  ROB: 

The  midyears  [examinations]  have  left  me  limp 
as  a  rag,  and  have  convinced  me  that,  instead  of 
an  amiable  divorce  such  as  you  suggest,  Philology 
and  Minerva  are  destined  to  part  with  mutual 
scorn  and  vituperation,  if  indeed  their  feud  does 
not  result  in  pistols  and  pillow-chokings.  If  you 
want  to  rescue  either  of  them  you  must  come  on 
in  March  as  you  promise,  for  I  will  not  answer 
for  their  lives  a  day  later  than  the  twentieth. 
Joking  aside,  though,  we  all  expect  you  then,  and 
are  already  beginning  to  plan  revels,  masques, 
and  pageants  of  royal  magnificence  to  fleet  the 
time  withal. 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

Stone  and  Kimball  .  .  .  are  getting  out  vol 
umes  of  verse  for  Mac  and  Santy  [Hugh  McCul- 
loch  and  George  Santayana]  and  have  even 
approached  me  with  harp  and  psaltery,  though  so 
far  I  have  had  grace  from  God  to  resist  their 
blandishments.  Cambridge  is  rather  good  fun 
this  winter.  The  Browning  Club,  I  hear,  still 
leads  a  subterranean  existence  somewhere,  but  its 
place  in  the  upper  world  has  been  taken  by  the 
"Folk-lore  Society,"  an  organization  much  af 
fected  by  voluptuous  young  ladies  yearning  to 
walk  in  the  cold  clear  light  of  science.  They  are 
all  saturated  with  sun-myths,  and  ghosts,  trolls, 
and  witches  are  their  daily  walk  and  conversation. 
My  frightened  attempts  to  be  statistical  have 
been  frowned  upon,  and  I  fear  I  shall  not  be  a 
success.  Mrs.  Toy  still  takes  pity  on  my  orphan 
state,  and  asks  me  to  see  interesting  people  at  her 
house.  Last  Friday  I  bearded  a  whole  den  of  lions 
at  Mrs.  Moulton's  —  from  old  Dr.  Holmes  to 
Robert  Grant  and  old  Trowbridge  —  to  say 
nothing  of  an  Oxford  prof  who  has  dined  with 
Dodo  at  the  Master  of  Balliol's.  Do  you  have  any 
time  for  writing?  Do  not  bury  your  talent  in  a 
napkin  —  even  if  the  napkin  stands  for  domestic 
bliss  and  the  ground  for  the  goodliness  of  this 

15 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

world.  Do  make  your  plans  to  come  on  during  the 
spring  vacation :  we  refuse  to  be  refused.  .  .  . 

WILL. 
Feb.  5,  1894. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

23  HILTON'S  BLOCK. 
CAMBRIDGE. 


I  don't  know  whether  you  know  that  I  have 
decided  to  shuffle  about  next  year  in  your  old 
shoes  —  with  Gates  in  English  22.  I  should  hesi 
tate  to  accept  it  did  I  not  have  such  splendid 
examples  before  my  eyes  of  gorgeous  scholastic 
butterflies  hatched  from  this  dull  cocoon. 

June  21,  1894. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

ENDION  COTTAGE, 
LONG  LAKE,  N.  Y. 
[Postmarked:  July  21,1894.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

Your  somewhat  hysterical  note  reached  me  just 
as  I  was  leaving  Cambridge,  and  since  I  reached 
this  loafer's  paradise  I  have  melted  into  a  spiritual 

16 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

jelly  fish,  with  a  corresponding  amount  of  energy 
for  letter  writing  or  any  other  occupation  of 
civilized  man.  I  sleep  by  the  week,  eat  by  the 
tub-full,  and  never  have  an  idea  from  one  day's 
end  to  another.  The  hotel,  which  is  a  mile  up  the 
lake,  is  full  of  a  dull  spawn,  only  human  by  virtue 
of  being  made  in  the  likeness  of  an  outraged  God. 
My  single  encounter  with  the  sex  has  not  bristled 
with  poetry,  for  though  I  sat  with  her  an  hour 
every  attempt  at  self-revelation  on  her  part  was 
met  by  my  exclamation,  unuttered  but  passion 
ate,  "O  brisky  juvenal,  and  eke  most  lovely 
Jew! "  Finding  no  earthly  lips  to  breathe  fire  into 
the  clay  of  my  longing,  I  lie  doggedly  on  my  back 
under  the  pines  and  wait  the  descent  of  the 
goddess.  Heaven  send  her  soon,  or  I  shall  be  past 
kissing!  To  do  the  place  justice  though,  it  is  very 
beautiful,  and  only  needs  a  remotely  adequate 
Comer  to  pant  through  the  blueness1  in  order  to 
put  me  in  direct  communication  with  Helicon  and 
Castaly. 

I   suppose  you   are  swimming   through  rose- 
colored  seas  of  song,  with  wan  breasts  glimmering 

1  "Come  then,  complete  incompletion,  O  comer, 
Pant  through  the  blueness,  perfect  the  summer!" 

BROWNING:  "Wanting  is  —  what?" 

17 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

up  toward  your  amorous  lips  —  in  other  words 
that  you  have  no  end  of  a  cinch  on  Apollo  and 
are  as  much  one  of  Venus's  cosseted  darlings  as 
you  bade  fair  to  be  when  I  left  you.  Please  keep 
me  informed  concerning  the  various  stages  of 

your  nearness  to  's  soul.     I   presume  you 

realize  what  sort  of  a  risk  you  run,  and  in  view 
of  our  talk  about  direct  and  indirect  passion  it 
would  be  supererogatory  for  me  to  hint  at  my 
firm  conviction  that  the  young  lady  in  question  is 
deeply  conversant  with  the  fact  that  a  straight 
line  is  the  shortest  distance  between  two  points, 
and  that  if  you  propose  to  work  out  any  little 
problems  in  spiritual  geometry  with  her,  you  will 
have  to  accept  the  theorem. 

All  my  plans  of  work  have  crumbled  away;  I 
simply  lie  and  cumber  the  earth,  outrageously 
contented.  I  feel  myself  drifting  toward  the  dam 
nable  heresy  that  the  unlit  lamp  and  the  ungirt 
loin1  have  their  advantages.  Can't  you  throw  me 
a  rope  in  the  shape  of  a  lyric  idea?  I  should  not 
know  what  to  do  with  it,  but  it  would  comfort  me. 

Beseechingly, 

W.  V.  M. 

1  "And  the  sin  I  impute  to  each  frustrate  ghost 
Is  —  the  unlit  lamp  and  the  ungirt  loin." 

BROWNING:  "  The  Statue  and  the  Bust."    . 
18 


WILLIAM    VAUGHN    MOODY 
(1894) 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

ENDION  COTTAGE, 

LONG  LAKE,  N.  Y. 

[July,  1894.] 

DEAR  ROB: 

Your  letter  reached  me  just  as  I  was  leaving 
Cambridge  for  this  hole  in  the  Adirondacks,  where 
myself  and  my  sister  propose  to  sleep  the  summer 
away.  It  is  a  stunning  place  as  far  as  natural 
beauty  is  concerned,  but  as  yet  not  even  a  re 
motely  adequate  Comer  has  consented  to  pant 
through  the  blueness.  Besides  the  deer  and  the 
bears  there  is  nothing  to  commune  with,  and  the 
single  social  resource  is  a  hotel  a  mile  up  the  lake, 
where  polypous  New  Yorkers  vaguely  swarm. 
Accordingly  there  is  no  excuse  for  me  if  I  do  not 
do  some  good  work  in  one  line  or  another,  but  I 
greet  my  opportunity  listlessly,  with  an  unlit 
lamp  and  an  ungirt  loin,  and  simply  lie  under  the 
pine  trees  and  cumber  the  earth  in  a  state  of  out 
rageous  content.  I  deeply  commiserate  you,  if  you 
propose  to  stay  in  that  hell's  kitchen  all  summer 
"dribbling  biographical  details  and  cheap  criti 
cism."  Your  outlook  on  the  teacher's  mission 
does  not  seem  pregnantly  optimistic.  I  was  glad 

19 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

to  hear  that  Bulfinch  is  so  near  completion  —  the 
thing  must  have  been  a  vile  bother.  .  .  . 

I  hope  you  will  cleave  to  the  plan  of  coming 
east  in  September.  We  will  have  that  dinner  at 
Marliave's  which  missed  fire  last  spring  and 
drink  a  bottle  of  Chianti  to  the  forgetting  of 
sorrows. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Mrs.  C.  H.  Toy 

CAMP  ENDION. 
LONG  LAKE,  N.  Y. 

[August,  1894.] 
DEAR  MRS.  TOY: 

.  .  .  Three  bears  have  been  shot  on  the  bor 
ders  of  the  lake  since  we  came,  one  of  them  on  the 
spot  where  we  had  picnicked  the  day  previous. 
For  a  decadent  spirit,  a  bewildered  moth  about  the 
candle  of  latter-day  Illumination,  I  maintain  this 
is  getting  pretty  near  to  Nature's  naked  bosom. 
Indeed,  the  forest  is  no  toy  forest,  but  rustles 
and  billows  away  on  every  hand  in  miles  on  miles 
of  reverberant  color.  I  can  do  nothing  with  it. 
Its  brutal  mindlessness,  its  huge  insouciance, 
awes  and  humiliates  me.  It  has  a  way  of  looking 
over  your  head  with  a  gay  and  ferocious  oblivion 
of  your  interesting  personality  that  puts  you  out 

20 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

of  countenance.  As  you  lie  on  your  back  under 
these  gigantic  pines  and  listen  to  the  inarticulate 
multitudinous  life  of  the  thing,  you  find  yourself 
reversing  the  Fichtean  telescope,  and  coming 
reluctantly  to  believe  that  perhaps  God  could 
manage  to  think  his  thoughts  without  pouring 
himself  through  just  your  highly  ingenious  brain. 
I  did  not  know  to  be  sure  that  the  contrary  con 
viction  was  at  the  base  of  all  my  thinking,  until 
the  negation  of  it  was  thus  thrust  into  my  face  — 
but  so  it  is,  and  the  experience  is  desperately 
debilitating.  I  have  developed  a  crooning  fond 
ness  for  the  Zeitgeist,  now  that  it  looks  like  a 
fever-clot  in  the  eternal  brain,  and  as  I  begin  to 
suspect  that  the  voice  of  many  prophets  prophesy 
ing  is  as  the  noon-fly  and  the  strident  midge  to 
vex  the  ears  and  eyes  of  God. 


To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

43  GRAY'S, 
CAMBRIDGE. 
DEAR  ROB: 

I  am  in  a  tight  place  and  need  a  little  money  to 
tide  me  over  till  the  Harvard  goose  begins  to  lay 
her  meagre  eggs.  Can  you  lend  me  fifty  on  our 

21 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

Bulfinch  expectations?  I  feel  very  mean  to  ask 
for  it,  but  being  in  a  hole  is  being  in  a  hole,  and 
the  situation  transcends  philosophy.  I  shall  want 
it  for  a  couple  of  months  at  the  longest. 

In  haste, 

W.  V.  M. 
Sept.  27,  1894. 

If  you  are  short  yourself,  you  wont  hesitate  to 
confess,  of  course. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

43  GRAY'S, 
CAMBRIDGE. 
[October,  '94.] 
DEAR  ROB: 

Your  note,  with  enclosed  check,  reached  me 
yesterday.  The  aptness  of  old  Bulfinch 's  remit 
tance  (was  Bulfinch  the  Book  or  the  Man?  My 
concepts  concerning  him  have  acquired  a  mythic 
vagueness)  —  the  aptness  of  the  remittance,  I 
say,  is  such  as  to  give  a  factitious  and  theatrical 
tinge  to  the  transaction.  I  hope  you  have  not 
tampered  with  the  Facts  of  History,  for  it  is 
comforting  to  think  that  the  ravens  still  come  so 
opportunely  to  feed  the  hungering  prophet.  I  had 

22 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

quite  made  up  my  mind  not  to  take  any  of  the 
proceeds,  as  your  work  on  the  book  after  I  left  it 
must  have  far  exceeded  my  own  little  scissorings 
and  pastings,  but  necessity  is  the  mother  of  lies, 
and  I  accept  as  brazenly  as  if  it  was  my  due, 
not  however,  without  a  surreptitious  pang  of 
gratitude.  .  .  . 

As  always, 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

43  GRAY'S  HALL. 

CAMBRIDGE. 
DEAR  ROB: 

You  will  forgive  me  for  not  sooner  answering 
your  kind  letter,  when  you  call  to  mind  your  early 
morning  and  midnight  coping  with  the  English 
22  fortnightly.  After  a  long  season  of  prayer  and 
watching,  I  feel  that  I  must  turn  a  deaf  ear  to 
your  alluring  invitation,  and  have  written  Her 
ri  ck  definitely  declining  the  position.  I  do  this 
with  a  full  realization  of  how  much  I  am  giving 
up,  both  materially  and  spiritually.  I  am  sure 
that  an  experience  of  Chicago  life  would  have 
been  a  good  thing  for  me,  and  it  goes  without 
saying  that  the  renewed  companionship  would 

•23 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

have  been  no  end  jolly.  At  the  same  time,  there 
are  other  considerations,  which  I  have  set  forth 
at  length  in  my  letter  to  Herrick  and  will  not 
bore  you  by  repeating  here,  which  make  it  clear 
to  me  that  I  should  remain  here  next  year,  and 
accept  the  instructorship  which  Hill  offers  me, 
with  a  prospect,  dim  perhaps  but  cherishable,  of 
pinching  a  fellowship  at  the  end  of  it.  The  mes 
sage  which  Miss  Mott-Smith  was  gracious  enough 
to  couple  with  yours  lends  an  added  pang  to  the 
renunciation,  but  I  must  be  strong  to  heed  not. 
With  sincerest  gratitude  for  your  kindness  in  the 
matter  and  as  sincere  regret  that  I  cannot  now 
see  my  way  clear  to  joining  you  in  spreading  the 
gospel  of  sweetness  and  light,  I  remain 
Faithfully  yours, 

W.  V.  M. 
April  25,  1895. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

43  GRAY'S  HALL, 

CAMBRIDGE. 
DEAR  ROB: 

I  have  called  several  times  on  Damon  without 
finding  him  at  home.   Hill,  I  believe,  has  spoken 

24 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

to  him  about  the  Chicago  position,  and  I  believe 
he  is  very  likely  to  accept  it  if  it  is  offered  him. 
He  is,  in  my  opinion,  the  best  man  for  your  pur 
poses  now  at  Harvard,  with  the  possible  excep 
tion  of  Young,  to  whom  the  Rajah  has  also  tenta 
tively  broached  the  subject.  I  know  less  about 
Young  myself,  but  he  is  in  high  favor  here  among 
the  undergraduates,  and  enjoys,  I  understand, 
the  light  of  the  Rajah's  countenance.  I  have 
compunctious  visi tings  every  now  and  then,  as 
I  think  of  the  friendly  time  we  might  have  had 
together  next  year.  You  will,  however,  dwell  only 
sporadically  upon  this  earth,  and  I  could  not  fol 
low  you,  except  by  way  of  imaginative  sympathy, 
into  the  interstellar  spaces  which  will  be  your 
real  abiding-place  —  whence  comes  abatement  of 
the  pang  of  renunciation.  I  hope  you  will  make 
your  visit  east  as  early  as  possible  that  we  may 
have  a  few  days'  usufruct  of  you  before  your 
wings  sprout. 

Hastily, 

WILL. 
May  9,  1895. 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 


To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

43  GRAY'S  HALL, 

CAMBRIDGE. 
DEAR  ROB: 

You  are  immensely  kind  to  bestow  upon  me 
the  honors  of  groomsmanship.  I  accept  with 
delight,  duly  tempered  with  a  sense  of  my  un- 
worthiness.  I  have  today  received  a  letter  from 
my  people  which  changes  the  outlook  for  me 
somewhat,  as  it  makes  it  necessary  for  me  to 
reap  a  larger  harvest  of  shekels  than  I  have  any 
immediate  prospect  of  doing  here.  If  you  have 
not  as  yet  made  an  offer  of  the  Chicago  position 
to  any  one  else  could  you  possibly  hold  it  open 
until  you  come  East?  Do  not  think  of  doing  so 
if  it  involves  any  risk  or  inconvenience  on  either 
your  part  or  Herrick's,  but  if  you  are  both  willing, 
I  should  be  glad.  I  hope  you  will  not  think  I  take 
an  altogether  mercenary  view  of  the  situation: 
you  must  take  the  spiritual  sub-intention  for 
granted.  I  shall  write  Herrick  to-day,  if  I  can 
bring  myself  to  brave  the  scorn  which  my 
tergiversation  will  merit  at  his  hands. 

Faithfully, 

May  18,  1895.  W.  V.  M. 

26 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

On  July  3,  1895,  Moody  and  I  sailed  for  Europe, 
landing  on  the  I5th  at  Antwerp,  where  we  were 
joined  for  a  short  trip  through  Brussels,  Ghent,  Bruges, 
Lille,  Amiens,  and  Beauvais  by  Professor  Gates. 
Moody's  delight  in  the  beauty  of  the  cathedrals,  the 
picturesqueness  of  the  landscapes,  and  the  bits  of  talk 
with  peasants,  servants,  and  railway  acquaintances 
which  he  never  failed  to  snatch,  was  a  constant  pleas 
ure.  The  easy  transitions  his  mind  made  from  poetic 
feeling  and  imagery  to  the  broadest  colloquial  humor 
made  him  an  incomparable  companion.  At  Amiens, 
for  example,  he  calls  the  delicate  rose-window  of  the 
cathedral  "God's  spiderweb";  at  Comines,  on  the 
border  of  France,  charmed  with  the  pure  French  of  the 
waitress,  he  asks  the  names  of  all  the  viands,  and  in 
return  communicates  that  the  English  name  of  rasp 
berry  jam  is  "Red-goo,"  and  with  a  solemnity  that 
convulses  us  watches  her  efforts  to  reproduce  it,  with 
much  rolling  of  the  R. 

On  the  26th,  Mr.  Gates  having  left  for  Paris,  we 
started  on  a  short  walking  tour  through  Brionne, 
1'Hotellerie,  Lisieux,  Caen,  Saint-Lo,  Tessy,  and  Vire. 
At  Caen,  on  a  rainy  afternoon,  Moody  made  the  first 
sketch  of  the  poem  which  eventually,  after  much 
revision,  became  "Jetsam."  At  Tessy-sur-Vire  we 
were  awakened  before  dawn  one  morning  by  the 
bugles  of  a  regiment  passing  up  one  of  the  narrow 
streets  —  a  valorous  music  strangely  impressive  in 
that  darkness  and  silence.  Moody  has  commemorated 
it  in  the  speech  of  the  Third  Youth  in  Act  iv  of  the 
"Masque  of  Judgment": 

27 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

"But  always  ere  the  dayspring  took  the  sky, 

Somewhere  the  silver  trumpets  were  aery,  — 

Sweet,  high,  oh,  high  and  sweet! 

What  voice  could  summon  so  but  the  Soul's  Paraclete? 

Whom  should  such  voices  call  but  me,  to  dare  and  die? 

O  ye  asleep  here  in  the  eyrie  town, 

Ye  mothers,  babes,  and  maids,  and  aged  men, 

The  plain  is  full  of  foe-men !  Turn  again  — 

Sleep  sound,  or  waken  half 

Only  to  hear  our  happy  bugles  laugh 

Lovely  defiance  down, 

As  through  the  steep 

Grey  streets  we  sweep, 

Each  horse  and  man  a  ribbed  fan  to  scatter  all  that  chaff!" 

Under  date  August  26th  I  find  in  my  journal  the 
following  entry: 

"Boat  [Rouen]  to  Caudebec;  thence  to  Yvetot  on 
foot;  thence  to  Havre.  Met  on  the  open  road  an  old 
man  dressed  very  meagrely,  with  slippers  open  at  the 
toes,  ragged  shirt,  and  bare  head,  who  lifted  his  hands 
eloquently,  and  chanted  to  the  empty  landscape : 


;H^pH 


Pourquoi?  Pourquoi? 

This  experience  was  the  germ  of  the  poem,  "Old 
Pourquoi,"  written  many  years  later. 

We  returned  to  America  in  September,  and  he  imme 
diately  went  to  Chicago  and  began  work  as  an  instructor 
in  the  English  Department  of  Chicago  University. 


28 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

BOSTON, 
Sept.  17,  1895. 
DEAR  ROB: 

I  reached  home  yesterday  and  am  stopping 
here  a  few  days  to  get  my  books  packed,  after 
which  I  shall  make  my  descent  on  Chicago.  I 
should  reach  the  University  Friday  afternoon  or 
Saturday  morning  next.  Can  you  secure  me  or 
suggest  to  me  a  temporary  abiding-place,  from 
the  vantage  shelter  of  which  I  may  survey  the 
field  of  battle,  learn  the  rudiments  of  tactic  and 
become  conversant  with  the  bristling  vocabulary 
of  arms? 


Will  telegraph  or  write  when  I  decide  upon  a 
train,  but  do  not  take  the  trouble  to  be  at  home 
on  my  advent.  You  could  leave  the  suggestion  as 
to  boarding  house  prominently  posted  to  catch 
my  hungering  eye. 

In  haste, 

W.  V.  M. 
39  Commonwealth  Ave. 


29 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

MY  DEAR  Miss  PEABODY: 

I  have  put  off  sending  you  the  verses  with  the 
naive  thought  of  using  them  for  a  link  between 
the  old  Cambridge  life  and  this  new  one.  Scoff  at 
my  superstition,  but  do  not  too  scornfully  entreat 
the  pathetic  little  versicle  of  a  bond-bearer,  shiv 
ering  with  the  double  knowledge  of  the  portentous 
mission  and  his  own  objective  comicality.  Cam 
bridge  —  mellow  and  autumnal  —  begins  already 
to  take  on  really  mythic  colors  —  to  loom  sym 
bolic,  under  the  stress  of  this  relentless  prairie 
light  and  vast  featureless  horizon.  I  begin  to 
believe  that  your  charge  against  me  of  theatrical 
ity  was  just  —  that  all  my  life  there  in  the  east 
was  a  sort  of  tragi-farce,  more  or  less  consciously 
composed,  so  rudely  awake  and  in  earnest  is 
everything  here.  .  .  . 

I  do  not  know  what  this  place  is  going  to  do  for 
me,  but  am  sure  of  its  potency  —  its  alchemical 
power  to  change  and  transmute.  It  is  appallingly 
ugly  for  one  thing  —  so  ugly  that  the  double  cur 
tain  of  night  and  sleep  does  not  screen  the  aching 
sense.  For  another  thing  it  is  absorbing  —  crude 
juice  of  life  —  intellectual  and  social  protoplasm. 

30 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

Far  aloft  hovers  phantom  Poetry,  no  longer  my 
delicate  familiar.  But  I  dream  of  another  coming 
of  hers,  a  new  companionship  more  valorous  and 
simple-hearted. 

•  •      .  •         •         •         •         •         •         •         • 

CHICAGO  UNIVERSITY 
Sept.  22,  1895. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

[CHICAGO, 
October  2,  1895.] 

Your  letter  came  yesterday,  with  cheek  on  the 
smooth  cheek  of  another  —  a  friendlier  pair  nor 
a  tunefuller  ever  stretched  wing  together.  Riding 
to  town  on  some  sort  of  transfigured  chariot  that 
whilom  was  a  railway  car,  I  perused  them.  Rest 
of  morning  spent  shopping  in  the  New  Jerusalem, 
walking  on  golden  pavements,  and  interwarbling 
on  the  theme  of  shirts  and  socks  with  whatever 
seraphic  creatures  had  found  it  good  that  day  to 
put  on  the  habit  and  estate  of  shop-girls  for  the 
glory  of  God  and  the  furtherance  of  his  kingdom. 
Returning,  the  lake  allured  me  —  one  topaz. 
Re-reading  of  letters.  Throbbing  of  the  topaz 
heart:  opening  and  shutting  of  the  sunlight: 
bursting  to  bloom  of  some  sudden  impalpable 

31 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

enveloping  flower  of  the  air,  with  the  scent 
thereof.  The  twentieth  century  dates  from  yes 
terday,  and  we  are  its  chosen;  if  not  as  signs  set 
in  the  heavens  of  its  glory,  at  least  as  morning 
birds  that  carolled  to  it,  mindless  of  the  seductive 
and  quite  palpable  worm. 

More  later  —  brutally  busy. 

W 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

[CHICAGO, 
October  23,  1895.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

I  have  so  far  made  but  miserly  return  for  that 
bully  long  letter  you  wrote  in  the  purpureal  flush 
of  reconciliation  and  renascent  duality  —  or  let 
me  say,  and  try  to  think,  trinity  —  with  the 
Bard.  If  you  knew  the  beast  Chicago,  the  paw 
ing  and  glaring  of  it,  you  would  not  find  me  hard 
to  forgive.  I  have  been  in  the  condition  of  the 
Kluger  Schneiderlein  in  the  bear-pit:  it  has  taken 
all  my  frightened  dexterity  to  keep  out  of  the 
jaws  of  the  creature.  Now  that  I  have  learned  its 
ways  a  trifle,  and  can  make  it  crack  my  nuts  and 
dance  to  my  fiddling,  the  first  use  I  make  of  my 
loosened  faculties  is  to  beg  forgiveness  for  past 

32 


WILLIAM  VAUGHN   MOODY 

shortcoming,  and  plead  for  more  letters.  I  am 
eager  to  know  how  you  find  Dvorak,  whether 
New  York  keys  you  up  or  spiritually  ham-strings 
you,  whether  the  fair,  the  chaste,  the  inexpressive 
She  has  throbbed  out  of  the  circumambient 
nebula;  what  you  and  the  Muse  find  to  talk  about 
under  the  sheets,  now  you  are  decently  married 
—  of  all  of  which  and  much  more  I  demand  an 
immediate  and  circumstantial  report. 

For  my  own  part  I  have  been  having  a  highly 
exciting  time.  I  have  two  classes  —  one  of  forty, 
the  other  of  twenty  —  nearly  two-thirds  of  whom 
are  girls.  Picture  my  felicity  when  I  inform  you 
that  far  from  the  frowsy,  bedraggled,  anemic, 
simpering  creatures  I  anticipated,  half  of  them  at 
least  are  stars.  I  regret  that  popular  usage  should 
have  dechromatized  the  term,  for  I  mean  stars 
of  the  most  authentic  stellarity  and  the  most 
convincing  twinkle.  Lecturing  before  them  is  like 
a  singing  progress  from  Bootes  to  the  Lyre,  with 
wayfaring  worlds  to  lift  the  chorus.  At  the  begin 
ning  I  made  an  honest  man's  effort  to  talk  about 
the  qualities  of  style  and  the  methods  of  descrip 
tion,  but  I  am  a  weak  vessel.  Now  I  drool  bliss 
fully  about  God  in  his  world,  with  occasional 
wadings  into  spumy  Styx  and  excursions  into  the 

33 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

empyrean.  My  work  has  been  heavier  so  far  than 
I  fondly  hoped  it  would  be,  and  I  can  see  little 
chance  ahead  for  sleeping  on  Latmos.  I  experience 
aching  diastoles,1  however,  and  that  is  the  great 
thing  to  my  thinking.  To  be  a  poet  is  a  much 
better  thing  than  to  write  poetry  —  out  here  at 
least,  watched  by  these  wide  horizons,  beckoned 
to  by  these  swift  streamers  of  victorious  sunset. 
After  the  fall  term  my  work  will  be  lighter,  then 
I  shall  try  a  night  out,  on  a  bed  of  lunary. 

I  have  just  had  a  letter  from ,  air  rarified, 

sky  greyish,  with  half -hints  of  opal  and  dove's 
breast,  a  confused  twittering  from  the  hedges,  not 
unpleasing.  Tenuous,  but  tense,  like  a  harp  string 
in  the  treble. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

[Autumn,  1895.] 

Tell  you  about  it?  Doth  the  wind  know  its 
wound,  wherefore  it  groaneth?  It  is  only  an 
affliction  of  the  stars,  at  least  this  recent  bundle 
of  pangs;  they  are  of  those  that  eat  the  hearts 

1  A  word  we  had  borrowed  from  physiology  —  the  dilatation 
of  the  heart  in  beating  —  and  used  as  a  name  for  moods  of  spiritual 
elation.  See  the  Introduction. 

34 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

of  crazy-headed  comets  zigzaging  across  the 
Zodiac.  Doubtless  the  incontinent  closing  of  the 
moon-flower  dailies  left  me  more  defenseless 
against  these  malign  astral  inroads,  but  the  root  of 
the  matter  is  some  sort  of  cosmic  apoplexy  or 
ear-ache  of  which  I  happen  to  be  the  centre. 
To  Hav  has  the  falling-sickness  or  the  everlasting 
doldrums,  and  selects  me  to  ache  through  —  that 
is  all.  If  I  were  not  precociously  aware  of  the 
devices  of  his  Celestial  Completeness  I  should 
suppose  quite  simply  that  Chicago  was  boring 
me  to  death,  that  my  work  was  meaningless 
drudgery,  that  the  crowd  of  spiteful  assiduous 
nothings  that  keep  me  from  It  (Ah,  the  vague 
sweet-shrouding  mute  arch  vocable!)  were  tanta 
lizing  me  into  stupid  rage,  and  stinging  my  eye 
balls  into  blindness  of  the  light.  When  in  moments 
of  weakness  I  transfer  the  blame  for  my  inward 
dissatisfaction  and  disarray  to  outward  things,  I 
am  on  the  point  of  trundling  my  little  instructorial 
droning-gear  into  Lake  Michigan,  and  stepping 
out  west  or  south  on  the  Open  Road,  a  free  man 
by  the  grace  of  God,  and  a  tramp  by  Rachel's 
intercession.  But  of  course  I  know  that  I  should 
only  be  changing  garments,  and  that  I  should 
wake  up  some  fine  night  and  find  my  hay-stack 

35 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

bristling  with  just  such  goblin  dissension  as  now 
swarms  over  my  counter-pane.  However,  it  is 
easy  to  stand  dissension.  Anything  is  better  than 
that  awful  hush  settling  down  on  everything,  as  if 
To  II av  had  suddenly  discovered  himself  to  be 
stuffed  with  sawdust,  and  lost  interest  in  his  own 
ends  and  appetites.  And  that  silence  your  brave 
words  have  scared  back.  I  really  begin  to  think 
you  are  Wise,  and  to  stand  in  awe  of  you.  That 
is  a  more  convincing  presentment  of  the  "trans- 
scendent  identity,"  that  which  shows  it  casting 
its  own  brain  on  one  side  as  a  worn  out  accessory, 
holding  its  own  heart  in  its  hands  to  burn,  like 
the  angel  in  Dante's  dream.  I  pay  you  the  com 
pliment  of  believing  that  you  would  be  capable 
of  that,  and  I  find  it  illustrious,  and  with  your 
gracious  permission  propose  to  set  it  for  a  sign, 
right  at  a  cross-roads  where  I  sometimes  skulk 
belated,  peering  fearful-eyed  for  Hecate. 

The  truth  of  the  matter  is,  I  suppose,  that  I  am 
dissatisfied  to  the  point  of  desperation  with  the 
kind  of  life  that  is  possible  out  here.  I  used  to 
have  days  in  the  east  when  a  hedge  of  lilac  over  a 
Brattle  Street  fence  or  a  strenuous  young  head 
caught  against  a  windy  sweep  of  sunset  on  Har 
vard  Bridge,  filled  me  with  poignant  perceptions 

36 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

of  a  freer  life  of  sense  and  spirit,  —  and  I  was  fre 
quently  vaguely  unhappy  over  it.  But  after  all 
one  had  n't  far  to  go  before  finding  some  refine 
ment  of  feeling,  some  delicate  arabesque  of  con 
vention,  to  help  make  up  for  the  lack  of  liberty. 
Out  here  there  is  even  less  liberty  (because  less 
thought)  and  there  is  nothing  —  or  next  to 
nothing  —  to  compensate.  If  my  lines  were  cast 
in  other  places,  —  even  other  places  in  this  gigan 
tic  ink-blot  of  a  town  —  I  could  make  shift  to 
enjoy  my  breath.  I  should  make  a  very  happy 
and  efficient  peanut- vender  on  Clark  or  Randolph 
Street,  because  the  rush  and  noise  of  the  blood  in 
the  city's  pulse  would  continually  solicit  and 
engage  me.  The  life  of  a  motor-man  is  not  without 
exhilarating  and  even  romantic  features,  and  an 
imaginative  boot-black  is  lord  of  unskirted  realms. 
But  out  here,  where  there  is  no  city  life  to  gaze  at, 
nothing  to  relieve  the  gaseous  tedium  of  a  mush 
room  intellectuality,  no  straining  wickedness  or 
valiant  wrestling  with  hunger  to  break  the  spec 
tacle  of  Gospel-peddling  comfort,  —  the  imagina 
tion  doth  boggle  at  it! 


37 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

[Probably  Autumn,  1895.] 

Mr.  Ruskin  would  not  be  happy  in  Chicago  — 
God  is  a  very  considerable  personage  —  So  is  Mr. 
Rockefeller  —  So  am  I,  but  for  a  different  reason 

—  Towers  of  Babel  are  out  of  fashion  —  Ride  a 
Rambler  —  Four  fifths  of  William  Blake  would 
not  be  accepted  for  publication  by  the  Harvard 
Advocate  —  Life  at  a  penny  plain  is  d — d  dear  — 
Eat  H.  O.  —  The  poet  in  a  golden  clime  was  born, 
but  moved  away  early  —  A  man  may  yearn  over 
his  little  brothers  and  sisters  and  still  be  a  good 
Laodicean  —  Art  is  not  long,  but  it  takes  a  good 
while  to  make  it  short  —  There  will  be  no  opera 
or  steel  engraving  in  the  twentieth  century  —  An 
angle-worm  makes  no  better  bait  because  it  has 
fed  on  Caesar  —  Wood  fires  are  dangerous  —  So 
is  life  at  a  penny  plain,  but  for  a  different  reason 

—  Towers  of  Babel,  though  out  of  fashion,  are 
well  received  in  Chicago  —  There  were  no  birds 
in  the  Tower  of  Babel  —  God  is  a  very  considerable 
personage  —  So  is  Olga  Nethersole  —  So  are  you, 
but  for  a  different  reason  —  I  am  owner  of  the 
spheres,  and  grow  land-poor  —  Literature  is  a 

38 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

fake  and  Nordau  is  its  prophet  —  God  bless 
McKinley  —  Love  is  not  Time's  fool :  he  was 
turned  off  for  lack  of  wit  —  Eve  was  born  before 
Ann  Radcliffe,  so  the  world  goes  darkling  — 
Tom  's  a  cold  —  I  am  old-rose,  quoth  'a  —  God's 
pittykins  'ield  ye,  zany,  for  thy  apple-greenness! 
'T  would  gi'  the  Ding-an-Sich  a  colic  to  set  eyes 
on  'e  —  Natheless  Monet  was  a  good  painter,  and 
color-blind  — 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

DEC.  i,  1895. 
MY  DEAR  DAN: 

Day  after  crowded  day  I  have  looked  at  your 
delightful  long  letter,  and  said,  in  the  sweet 
babble  of  the  Little  Cricket  Thing,1  that  I  would 
answer  it  sooner  or  later,  when  I  was  not  as  busy 
as  hell.  Then  the  speaking  lines  about  your  reclin 
ing  on  the  Paderewskian  bosom,  arrived,  with 
their  tantalizing  suggestion  of  dim-lighted  rooms, 
transcendentalized  rum  toddy,  and  an  auroral 
head  uttering  gold  vaticination.  I  was  jaundiced 

1  He  refers  to  the  parody  by  a  Harvard  friend,  already  men 
tioned,  of  some  lines  in  his  song  "My  love  is  gone  into  the  East." 
See  page  xxv. 

39 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

with  jealousy  for  a  week,  thinking  of  the  fulness 
of  your  service  before  the  great  altars,  and  the 
wretched  scantlings  of  effort  I  was  permitted 
to  give,  standing  afar  off.  To  tell  the  truth,  I 
have  n't  the  faintest  splinter  of  sympathy  for 
the  dolorousness  of  your  condition,  as  set  forth  in 
your  letter.  To  be  a  runner  of  scales  and  to  work 
at  canon  and  fugue  by  the  job,  strikes  me  as  the 
most  enviable  estate  of  man.  Every  scale  you 
run,  every  fugue  you  hammer  out,  is  laying  up 
treasure  in  heaven  —  not  by  way  of  communal 
walls  and  pavements  only,  but  especially  for  the 
house  which  your  own  winged  self-ship  shall 
inhabit.  I  have  as  much  respect  for  you  as  for 
a  disgruntled  peach  seed,  which  should  cry  out 
against  the  lack  of  social  opportunities  in  an 
underground  community.  And  besides  the  ulti 
mate  satisfaction,  there  is  the  daily  delight  of 
pottering  over  your  tools,  trying  their  edge, 
polishing  their  surfaces,  feeling  their  delectable 
ponderableness.  No,  you  must  go  for  comfort  to 
somebody  who  does  n't  have  a  sense  of  radiant 
bien-etre  in  fitting  a  new  pen  into  a  holder. 

Which  reminds  me  that,  having  a  few  hours 
last  week  for  ecstatic  contemplation  of  my  navel, 
I  emitted  a  more  or  less  piercing  yawp  there- 

40 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

concerning,  in  the  form  of  a  new  treatment  of  the 
moon  theme.1  I  have  unfortunately  bundled  off 
the  only  copy  to  the  Singer,  so  that  I  cannot  send 
you  the  product,  but  if  you  are  still  interested  you 
may  ask  her  to  pass  it  on  to  you.  You  will  no 
doubt  find  much  to  dislike  in  it,  but  I  hope  that 
some  of  it  may  meet  with  your  approval.  You 
will  recognize  the  elements  drawn  from  that  unfor 
gettable  night  in  the  fields  at  Chartres.  Having 
temporarily  exorcised  this  particular  demon,  I 
am  losing  sleep  over  a  project  for  a  play,  dealing 
with  a  character  and  a  situation  which  seem  to  me 
intensely  significant  and  eloquent,  that  of  Slatter, 
the  "New  Mexico  Messiah,"  who  has  been  doing 
things  in  Denver  of  late.  But  I  need  not  bother 
you  with  dough  still  in  the  kneading.2 

I  am  looking  forward  to  some  bully  good  talks 
at  Christmas,  and  some  good  music  at  your 
expense,  and  a  bottle  of  wine  wherein  we  may 
drink  to  the  meek  brows  of  Her  and  It.  Mean 
while,  write. 

WILL. 

1  The  poem  started  in  Caen  the  preceding  summer.    It  eventu 
ally  became  "Jetsam." 

2  "The   Faith  Healer"  did  not,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  take  on 
final  shape  until  shortly  before  its  author's  death. 

41 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Mary  L.  Mason 

CHICAGO, 
Dec.  12,  1895. 

MY  DEAR  MRS.  MASON, 

You  are  wofully  ignorant  of  the  sweet  uses  of 
memory  if  you  can  picture  me  forgetting  your 
delightful  invitation  to  spend  a  fraction  of  my 
Christmas  week  at  your  home.  .  .  . 

Whisper  it  not  in  Gath,  but  I  hunger  and  thirst 
after  the  East  with  a  carnal  longing.  I  thought  I 
had  relegated  all  you  subtlety-spinning  New 
Englanders  to  the  limbo  of  the  effete,  where  you 
were  tolerantly  allowed  to  exist  and  confuse  eco 
nomic  relations  only  because  you  are,  after  all, 
rather  nice.  But  of  late,  in  the  still  watches,  your 
niceness  grows  luminous  and  summoning.  I  still 
disapprove  of  you,  but  I  want  to  see  you  very  bad. 

Expectantly, 
WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

CHICAGO, 
Dec.  15  [16?],  1895. 

Just  a  word  to  tell  you  something  of  the  im 
mense  good  your  letter  did  me.  After  I  sent  off 

42 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

the  poem  ["Jetsam"],  the  inevitable  revulsion 
set  in:  I  lost  faith  in  it,  and  then,  being  in  a  state 
of  nerves,  took  the  easy  step  of  losing  faith  in 
myself  and  the  future.  Still  I  kept  hoping  against 
hope  that  you  would  find  a  stray  line  to  like  and 
praise.  When  the  days  passed,  and  your  silence 
pronounced  gentle  but  final  condemnation,  I  sat 
down  and  read  the  lines  over.  They  had  fallen 
dead  ink.  The  paper  dropped  to  the  floor;  I  sat, 
elbows  on  desk  and  head  in  hands,  and  thought. 
I  had  felt  the  thing,  I  had  put  my  best  breath  into 
the  lines,  and  here  they  were,  not  only  dead  past 
hope,  but  graceless,  repulsive,  without  the  dig 
nity  or  pathos  of  death.  What  then?  For  a  long 
time  I  did  not  have  heart  squarely  to  face  the 
issue  —  Life  without  that  hope  and  solace,  that 
pillar  of  smoke  by  day  and  of  fire  by  night,  — 
could  I  live  it  out  so,  in  some  sort  of  grey  content? 
Outside  my  window  the  moon  came  out  over  the 
turbulent  brute  groping  of  the  brown  surge,  walk 
ing  in  light  as  when  she  tormented  the  lowered 
eyes  of  Job,  tempting  him  from  Jehovah.  She 
called  me  out  with  her,  miles  along  the  coast,  and 
as  I  stumbled  along  in  the  vague  light,  gradually 
the  mere  effort  I  had  made  to  say  something  of 
her  wonder,  began  to  seem  its  own  justification. 

43 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

When  I  came  back  the  pages  I  gathered  from  the 
floor  were  farther  than  ever  from  adequacy,  but 
somehow  I  cared  for  them,  as  one  cares  for  a  dead 
thing  one  picks  up  in  the  hedges,  thinking  of  its 
brave  fight  for  life.  Then  your  letter  came,  and  I 
read,  stupidly  at  first,  not  understanding,  your 
words  of  generous  praise.  I  knew  you  were  artist 
enough  not  to  utter  them  merely  for  friendship's 
sake,  and  when  I  understood  them,  they  filled  me 
with  joy  which  would  have  been  out  of  all  propor 
tion  to  the  matter  at  stake  except  that  for  me  it 
was  one  of  those  mysterious  pivotal  small  things 
on  which  the  future  turns  silent  and  large.  So  you 
had  actually  liked  it  all,  and  were  glad  it  had  been 
done?  Then  it  was  not  dead  after  all;  my  eyes 
had  been  seared?  I  read  it  through  in  the  flush  of 
pleasure  and  found  it  good,  —  absurdly,  ravish- 
ingly  good !  So  I  took  a  deep  breath,  and  sat  down 
to  write  it  over,  with  the  sharp  light  of  remembered 
disillusion  on  its  weaknesses,  and  the  memories  of 
my  night  walk  to  beckon  me  on.  I  shall  crave 
judgment  on  the  result  at  Christmas,  for  I  pur 
pose  to  make  a  descent  on  Boston  then,  ravenous 
with  a  three-month's  abstinence  from  subtlety- 
spinning.  ...  I  have  .  .  .  written  to  

again.  He  has  owed  me  a  letter  since  September, 

44 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

but  God  knows  who  has  the  rights  of  this  wretch 
edness,  and  of  all  our  funny  little  Pantheon  the 
absurd  little  god  who  gets  the  least  of  my  service 
is  the  one  labelled  "  Personal  Dignity."  I  can 
not  think  of  any  personal  sacrifice  I  would  not 
make  to  convince  him  of  my  friendship,  or  rather 
to  establish  once  more  the  conditions  which  make 
friendship  possible.  I  hope  this  does  n't  sound 
superior;  it  is  not  so  meant. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

Dec.  15,  1895. 

1.  Shall  reach  New  York  .  .  .  Dec.  19. 

2.  Shall  reach  Boston  .  .  .  Dec.  26. 

3.  Must  leave  Boston  .  .  .  Dec.  31. 

4.  Shall  leave  Boston  .  .  .  God  knows. 

All  except  last  date  subject  to  change  without 
notice. 

W.  V.  M. 

The  hope  of  a  vacation,  expressed  in  the  following 
letter  in  a  characteristic  metaphor,  was  illusory.  Save 
for  a  ten-day  bicycle  trip  with  Mr.  Schevill  in  the 
following  June  Moody  seems  to  have  stuck  close  to  the 
"shop"  for  many  months.  In  August  he  writes  that 
he  is  to  work  all  winter,  in  order  to  get  a  nine-months' 

45 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

holiday  beginning  in  the  spring.  In  the  letter  of 
November  24  he  speaks  of  having  had  "fourteen  con 
secutive  months  of  hack  teaching,"  a  statement  which 
was  not  literally  true,  but  which  doubtless  seemed  true 
to  his  eager  mind,  always  longing  for  fruitful  leisure, 
fretful  under  drudgery.  He  eventually  got  away,  as 
will  be  seen,  in  March,  1897. 

To  Mrs.  C.  H.  Toy 

CHICAGO, 
Jan.  6,  1896. 
MY  DEAR  MRS.  TOY: 

...  It  seemed  very  good  to  see  a  Cambridge 
face  again,  especially  against  this  background  of 
phantasmagoric  ugliness.  I  long  for  something 
beautiful  to  look  at  with  a  really  agonized  and 
fleshly  longing.  My  eye  is  horny  with  smoke  and 
the  outlines  of  grain  elevators.  But  I  must  not 
enlarge  upon  my  "state,"  since  day  is  at  hand. 
Looking  up  through  the  murk  and  the  swaying 
shadow  of  seaweed  I  can  just  catch  a  hint  of 
vanishing  bubbles  and  green  shattered  needles  of 
light.  Two  months  more  and  I  shall  lift  my 
encompassed  head  above  the  waters.  Then  off 
with  the  diving  gear  and  ho  for  the  groves  of 
banyan  and  of  cocoanut,  and  the  little  Injuns 
that  grow  between!  .  .  . 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Mary  L.  Mason 

CHICAGO. 
Jan.  n,  1896. 

MY  DEAR  MRS.  MASON, 

I  have  postponed  writing  because  I  suspected 
you  would  rather  have  a  letter  written  com 
posedly  out  of  a  rising  desire  for  talk  or  its  substi 
tute,  than  a  hurried  note  setting  forth  with  a 
prim  gasp  that  I  had  got  here  with  no  broken 
bones.  I  have  not  quite  got  accustomed  to  the 
raw  bite  of  things  again,  after  humoring  my  skin 
with  the  delicate  eastern  impingements.  Indeed 
I  have  been  since  getting  back  as  helpless  a  victim 
to  the  blue  devils  as  it  is  in  my  temperament  ever 
to  be.  The  gross  result  of  the  life  one  can  lead  in 
a  place  like  this  is  satisfactory  enough,  but  the 
net  result,  the  fine  slow-oozing  crystal  distillation, 
is  tragically  small  —  and  I  fancy  that  for  such  as 
I  the  unsublimated  mass  must  always  keep  a 
disheartening  suggestion.  The  enervating  thing 
about  the  place  is  its  shallow  kindness.  People 
are  so  eager  to  give  you  credit  for  virtues  that  you 
do  not  possess  that  you  feel  ashamed  to  put  forth 
those  that  are  yours.  Then  when  you  do  take 
heart  of  grace,  and  do  or  say  or  think  a  really  good 

47 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

thing,  and  win  the  facile  applause,  you  have  a 
bad  taste  in  the  mouth  to  think  that  any  jigster's 
trick  would  have  won  you  the  same  magnificent 
triumph.  I  sigh,  like  the  ancient  worthy,  for  a 
stern  friend,  one  who  will  not  be  gulled  by  any 
thimble-rig  sophistry,  who  will  puncture  with 
sweet  skepticism  my  little  soap-bubble  eloquences, 
and  by  so  doing  give  me  heart  to  try  and  be  wise. 
I  recognize  of  course  that  the  wish  is  a  weak  one, 
that  I  ought  to  be  my  own  detective,  gendarme, 
judge,  and  hangman;  and  I  have  made  some 
flabby  efforts  to  execute  these  functions  upon  my 
self,  but  so  far  with  indifferent  success.  Do  you 
think  a  wife  would  do  any  good?  I  have  cast 
appalled  glances  at  that  ultimate  rigor  of  self- 
discipline,  but  my  eyes  have  been  blest  by  no 
reassuring  light.  Something  I  must  have  to  key 
life  up,  to  give  it  musical  pitch  and  the  knit 
coherence  of  music.  If  I  were  free  I  could  get  all 
that  out  of  my  little  gift  and  great  passion  for  the 
poet's  craft,  but  hampered  as  I  am  by  intellectual 
drudgery  that  is  only  one  burden  more,  and  adds 
the  last  note  of  poignancy  to  the  tedium  of  the 
days.  I  have  lately  thought  with  envy  amounting 

to  wickedness  of  D 's  complete  service  of  the 

thing  that  seems  to  him  real  under  the  sun :  if  he 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

were  not  so  dear,  I  could  find  it  in  my  heart  to 
hate  him  cordially  for  it. 

Another  thing  that  afflicts  my  soul  is  the  deli 
cate  strange  winter  light  that  lies  over  a  cer 
tain  hill  called  Milton,  at  the  rising  of  the  sun 
and  the  going  down  thereof,  and  the  tentative 
fluttering  talk  of  a  girl  who  is  destined  to  tread 
much  in  the  lonely  places  of  life  and  suffer  much. 
Fortunately,  there  is  there  too  the  talk  of  a 
brave  woman  who  sees  life  clearly  and  sees  it 
whole,  and  whose  verdict  is,  I  am  sure,  that  in 
spite  of  suffering  and  lonely  places  it  is  worth 
while. 

I  have  not  been  able  to  get  the  edition  of 
Keats's  letters  that  I  wanted  you  to  see;  I  hope 
you  will  like  the  little  picture  which  I  send  in 
stead. 

Faithfully  yours, 

WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

SUNDAY,  Jan.  19,  1896. 
DEAR  DAN, 

The  news  you  send  about  your  wrist  is  quite 
heart-breaking.  I  have  not  written  sooner  because 
I  could  not  find  it  in  my  breast  to  speak  comfort, 

49 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

feeling  there  only  rebellion  and  disgust  at  the 
world  order  and  its  ghastly  lack  of  breeding.  How 
did  you  precipitate  it?  I  can  only  fall  back  on 
thoughts  of  Schumann  and  his  lame  finger  or 
whatever  it  was  that  spoiled  him  for  concert 
gymnastics,  and  made  him  a  minstrel  in  the  court 
celestial.  At  any  rate  that  question  of  composing 
away  from  the  piano  is  settled,  with  a  right 
parental  emphasis  from  the  slipper  of  Mischance. 
...  I  will  spare  you  the  usual  admonition  about 
the  rigidity  of  your  upper  lip,  in  spite  of  the  natural 
longing  I  feel  to  use  the  heirloom. 

I  have  been  brutally  busy  since  getting  back,  on 
Uncle  Horace's  book,1  so  that  all  my  schemes  of 
spiritual  conquest  are  done  up  in  moth-balls  for 
the  time  being.  .  .  .  One  o'clock  midnight,  and 
the  morrow  flames  responsibility.  Hire  a  type 
writer  —  marry  one  if  necessary  —  and  we  will 
annihilate  space.  I  have  a  creature  to  tell  you 
about  —  but  a  Creature ! 

W.  V.  M. 

1  Some  editorial  work  he  had   undertaken  for  Mr.  Horace 
Scudder. 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

CHICAGO,  Feb.  16,  1896. 
DEAR  DAN: 

I  have  just  heard  from  your  sister-in-law  of 
your  enforced  furlough.  I  am  not  going  to  help 
you  curse  your  luck,  knowing  your  native  capa 
bilities  in  that  direction  to  be  perfectly  adequate, 
but  my  Methodist  training  urges  me  to  give  you 
an  epistolary  hand-grasp,  the  purport  of  which  is 
"Keep  your  sand.11  I  could  say  other  things,  not 
utterly  pharisaical.  I  could  say  what  I  have  often 
said  to  myself,  with  a  rather  reedy  tremolo  per 
haps,  but  swelling  sometimes  into  a  respectable 
diapason.  "The  dark  cellar  ripens  the  wine." 
And  meanwhile,  after  one's  eyes  get  used  to  the 
dirty  light,  and  one's  feet  to  the  mildew,  a  cellar 
has  its  compensations.  I  have  found  beetles  of 
the  most  interesting  proclivities,  mice  altogether 
comradely  and  persuadable,  and  forgotten  pota 
toes  that  sprouted  toward  the  crack  of  sunshine 
with  a  wan  maiden  grace  not  seen  above.  I  don't 
want  to  pose  as  resourceful,  but  I  have  seen  what 
I  have  seen. 

The  metaphor  is  however  happily  inexact  in 
your  case,  with  Milton  to  retire  to  and  Cambridge 

51 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

humming  melodiously  on  the  horizon.  If  you  can 
only  throttle  your  Daemon,  or  make  him  forego 
his  leonine  admonition  "Accomplish,"  and  roar 
you  as  any  sucking  dove  the  sweet  vocable  "  Be," 
—  you  ought  to  live.  I  have  got  mine  trained  to 
that,  pardee!  and  his  voice  grows  not  untunable. 
I  pick  up  shreds  of  comfort  out  of  this  or  that  one 
of  God's  ashbarrels.  Yesterday  I  was  skating  on  a 
patch  of  ice  in  the  park,  under  a  poverty-stricken 
sky  flying  a  pitiful  rag  of  sunset.  Some  little 
muckers  were  guying  a  slim  raw-boned  Irish  girl 
of  fifteen,  who  circled  and  darted  under  their 
banter  with  complete  unconcern.  She  was  in  the 
fledgling  stage,  all  legs  and  arms,  tall  and  adorably 
awkward,  with  a  huge  hat  full  of  rusty  feathers, 
thin  skirts  tucked  up  above  spindling  ankles, 
and  a  gay  aplomb  and  swing  in  the  body  that  was 
ravishing.  We  caught  hands  in  midflight,  and 
skated  for  an  hour,  almost  alone  and  quite  silent, 
while  the  rag  of  sunset  rotted  to  pieces.  I  have 
had  few  sensations  in  life  that  I  would  exchange 
for  the  warmth  of  her  hand  through  the  ragged 
glove,  and  the  pathetic  curve  of  the  half-formed 
breast  where  the  back  of  my  wrist  touched  her 
body.  I  came  away  mystically  shaken  and  elate. 
It  is  thus  the  angels  converse.  She  was  something 

52 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

absolutely  authentic,  new,  and  inexpressible, 
something  which  only  nature  could  mix  for  the 
heart's  intoxication,  a  compound  of  ragamuffin, 
pal,  mistress,  nun,  sister,  harlequin,  outcast,  and 
bird  of  God,  —  with  something  else  bafflingly 
suffused,  something  ridiculous  and  frail  and  sav 
age  and  tender.  With  a  world  offering  such 
rencontres,  such  aery  strifes  and  adventures,  who 
would  not  live  a  thousand  years  stone  dumb?  I 
would,  for  one  —  until  my  mood  changes  and  I 
come  to  think  on  the  shut  lid  and  granite  lip  of 
him  who  has  had  done  with  sunsets  and  skating, 
and  has  turned  away  his  face  from  all  manner  of 
Irish.  I  am  supported  by  a  conviction  that  at  an 
auction  on  the  steps  of  the  great  white  Throne,  I 
should  bring  more  in  the  first  mood  than  the 
second  —  by  several  harps  and  a  stray  dulcimer. 
I  thoroughly  envy  you  your  stay  at  Milton  — 
wrist,  Daemon,  and  all.  You  must  send  me  a 
lengthy  account  of  the  state  of  things  in  Cam 
bridge.  ...  If  the  wrist  forbids  writing,  employ  a 
typewriter  of  the  most  fashionable  tint  —  I  will 
pay  all  expenses  and  stand  the  breakage.  I  stipu 
late  that  you  shall  avoid  blondes  however,  they 
are  fragile. 

WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY. 
53 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

CHICAGO,  April  n,  1896. 
MY  DEAR  DAN: 

Yesterday  morning  mint  appeared  in  the 
market  windows,  and  this  morning  the  lake  is  a 
swoon  of  silver  and  blue;  —  argal,  I  must  write 
you  a  letter.  I  have  felt  for  the  past  two  weeks 
as  if  I  had  fallen  heir  to  something,  owing  to 
the  fact  that  spring  turns  out  to  be  a  month 
earlier  here  than  in  the  east,  and  she  comes  over 
the  prairies  with  the  naive  confidence  and  sweet 
quick  surrender  that  she  has  learned  from  the 
prairie  girls.  For  the  first  time  since  your  rustica 
tion  I  have  ceased  to  envy  you  your  domiciliation 
among  the  blue  hills  of  Milton,  for  my  side  of  the 
bubble  has  swung  sunward  and  what  care  I  if 
it  be  made  of  kitchen  soap?  I  walk  about  in 
an  amber  clot  of  sensuousness,  and  feel  the  sap 
mount,  like  a  tree.  I  thought  —  and  often  gloom 
ily  asseverated  —  that  I  had  got  over  this  purring 
rapture  at  the  general  situation,  legitimately  the 
gift  of  the  primitive  or  the  jagged.  Well,  I  did  not 
give  Nature  credit  for  the  virtue  that  is  in  her. 

My  work,  alas,  still  continues  to  be  hard.  I  use 
up  all  my  vital  energies  before  the  evening  loaf 

54 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

comes  on,  and  then  have  force  only  for  passive 
delights.  I  stick  a  good  round  straw  into  a  cask 
of  Spenser  or  Hardy,  and  suck  myself  to  sleep  — 
to  dream  of  orchards  and  "  golden- tongued 
Romance  with  serene  lute."  The  hard  bright  sun 
of  a  western  morning,  with  theme  classes  super 
imposed,  reduces  the  golden  tongue  to  phantom 
thinness  of  song  and  banishes  the  lute  into  the 
limbo  of  the  ridiculous,  but  I  plod  on  evening- 
wards  with  mole-like  assiduity.  I  have  come  to 
realize  the  wonderful  resources  of  passive  enjoy 
ment  better  than  I  ever  did  before  —  perhaps 
perversely,  perhaps  according  to  a  mere  instinct 
of  self-preservation  against  the  hurry  and  remorse 
less  effectiveness  of  life  out  here.  Whatever  the 
cause,  I  have  found  out  how  good  a  thing  it  is  to 
be  a  silly  sheep  and  batten  on  the  moor,  to  stand 
in  cool  shallows  and  let  the  water  go  by  and  the 
minnows  dart  and  the  brook  moss  stretch  its 
delicate  fingers.  Also  I  seem  to  be  coming,  half 
through  disappointed  effort  and  half  through  this 
same  effortlessness,  to  discern  more  clearly  what 
is  worthy  in  human  motive  and  admirable  in 
human  achievement.  It  is  not  that  I  love  Shake 
speare  less,  but  that  I  love  Ophelia  more. 

W.  V.  M. 
55 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

MAY  16,  1896. 
DEAR  DAN: 

Your  letter  came  this  morning  in  time  to  give 
me  a  goodly  fit  of  the  blues,  thinking  of  Milton 
in  spring,  and  thence  by  easy  derivation  of  all 
the  other  excellencies  from  which  my  exiled  feet 
are  held.  I  can't  repay  the  pang,  but  as  the  near 
est  thing  to  a  heavenly  affliction  which  I  can  com 
mand  I  send  you  a  poem  which  I  have  just  written 
about  the  Creature  I  once  hinted  to  you  of  —  a 
Girl  who  haunted  the  symphonies  last  winter.  I 
hope  you  will  like  it,  because  it  is  almost  the  first 
thing  I  have  done  which  has  been  a  direct  impulse 
from  "real"  life,  and  you  know  I  have  theories 
about  that.  Also  what  I  tried  to  say  is  a  thing 
which  constitutes  much  of  the  poetry  of  a  young 
man's  life,  I  think,  and  if  I  could  have  got  it  said 
would  have  had  a  certain  large  interpretive  value. 
Let  me  know  your  opinion,  at  as  great  length  as 
your  nerves  and  your  nurse  will  permit. 

WILL. 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

WILDING    FLOWER 

TONIGHT  her  lids  shall  lift  again 

Slow-soft  with  vague  desire, 

And  lay  about  my  breast  and  brain 

Their  hush  of  lilac  fire, 

And  I  shall  take  the  sweet  of  pain 

As  the  laborer  his  hire. 

And  while  the  happy  viols  shake, 

Under  the  paltry  roof, 

The  web  of  singing  worlds  they  make 

To  shelter  Heaven  aloof, 

Our  listening  hearts  shall  build  and  break 

Love's  sempiternal  woof. 

O!  listening  heart,  with  all  thy  powers 

Of  white  beatitude, 

What  is  the  dearest  of  God's  dowers 

To  the  children  of  his  blood? 

Where  blow  the  lovesome  wilding  flowers 

In  the  hollows  of  his  wood? 

That,  though  her  ear  hath  never  caught 
The  name  men  call  me  by, 

57 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

That,  though  my  lot  from  her  sweet  lot 
Lyeth  as  sky  from  sky, 
And  my  fain  lonely  hand  dare  not 
Touch  hers  for  comradery,  — 

Yet  her  shy  devious  lambent  soul 
With  my  slow  soul  should  walk, 
That  linked  like  lovers  we  should  stroll 
By  rivers  of  glad  talk, 
Or  bow  to  the  music's  wind-control 
As  stalk  by  the  lily  stalk; 

Yet  never  break,  with  a  fool's  mean  waste, 

The  bubble  of  dream  sky, 

All  gorgeous  runnelled,  window-spaced, 

With  blaze  of  drifted  dye,  — 

This  is  a  happiness  to  taste 

Life's  farthest  meanings  by. 

The  flushed  adventurous  violins 
Climbing  the  crudded  mist, 
The  clear  horn  calling  when  it  wins 
Its  tower  noon-precipiced, 
The  aching  oboe  throat  that  twins 
Night's  moonward  melodist, 
58 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

Shall  find  naught  in  the  heavens  of  air 

That  they  may  name  beside 

The  rhythmic  joyance  she  doth  wear 

Whether  she  go  or  bide, 

The  wood -pool  lustres  of  her  hair, 

Or  her  lip's  wistful  pride. 

Oath-graven  and  heart-historied 

Shall  be  our  marriage  ring, 

Though  oath  of  dead  to  sheeted  dead 

Be  a  louder  spoken  thing; 

My  sign  shall  be  upon  her  head 

While  stars  do  meet  and  sing. 

Not  such  a  sign  as  women  wear 
Who  bow  beneath  the  shame 
Of  marriage  insolence,  and  bear 
A  house- wife's  faded  name ; 
Nor  such  as  passion  eateth  bare 
With  its  carcanet  of  flame ; 

Nor  such  a  sign  as  happy  friend 
Sets  on  his  friend's  dear  brow, 
When  meadow  pipings  break  and  blend 
To  a  key  of  subtle  woe, 
And  the  orchard  says  play- time  's  at  end, 
Best  unclasp  hands  and  go. 
59 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

But  where  she  strays,  in  blight  or  blooth, 

One  fadeless  flower  she  wears, 

A  mystic  gift  God  gave  my  youth, 

Whose  petals  dim  are  fears, 

Awes,  adorations,  songs  of  ruth, 

Hesitancies  and  tears. 

O!  heart  of  mine,  with  all  thy  powers, 

Of  strange  beatitude, 

What  is  the  dearest  of  God's  dowers 

To  the  children  of  His  blood? 

Where  blow  the  lovesome  wilding  flowers 

In  the  hollows  of  His  wood? 

WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY. 
May,  1896. 

The   revised   form   of   this   poem,   printed   in   the 
"Poems"  of  1901,  is  as  follows:  — 

HEART'S  WILD   FLOWER 

TO-NIGHT  her  lids  shall  lift  again,  slow,  soft,  with 

vague  desire, 
And  lay  about  my  breast  and  brain  their  hush  of  spirit 

fire, 
And  I  shall  take  the  sweet  of  pain  as  the  laborer  his 

hire. 

60 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

And  though  no  word  shall  e'er  be  said  to  ease  the 

ghostly  sting, 
And  though  our  hearts,  unhoused,  unfed,  must  still 

go  wandering, 
My  sign  is  set  upon  her  head  while  stars  do  meet  and  sing. 

Not  such  a  sign  as  women  wear  who  make  their  fore 
heads  tame 

With  life's  long  tolerance,  and  bear  love's  sweetest, 
humblest  name, 

Nor  such  as  passion  eateth  bare  with  its  crown  of 
tears  and  flame. 

Nor  such  a  sign  as  happy  friend  sets  on  his  friend's 

dear  brow 
When  meadow-pipings  break  and  blend  to  a  key  of 

autumn  woe, 
And  the  woodland  says  playtime's  at  end,  best  unclasp 

hands  and  go. 

But  where  she  strays,  through  blight  or  blooth,  one 

fadeless  flower  she  wears, 
A  little  gift  God  gave  my  youth,  —  whose  petals  dim 

were  fears, 
Awes,  adorations,  songs  of  ruth,  hesitancies,  and  tears. 

O  heart  of  mine,  with  all  thy  powers  of  white  beatitude, 
What  are  the  dearest  of  God's  dowers  to  the  children 

of  his  blood? 
How  blow  the  shy,  shy  wilding  flowers  in  the  hollows 

of  his  wood ! 

61 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

MAY  24,  1896. 
DEAR  DAN: 

Thanks  for  your  painstaking  and  very  percep 
tive  criticism.  I  cannot  bring  myself  yet  to  accept 
all  your  strictures  unconditionally,  but  I  find  them 
all  suggestively  and  wisely  hortatory,  pointing  the 
way  where  the  real  pitfalls  lie  for  me ;  and  I  know 
that  by  the  time  I  come  to  put  the  verses  in  per 
manent  form  I  shall  have  accepted  most  of  them 
literally.  Still,  while  I  am  still  unpersuaded,  let 
me  distinguish.  The  vague  syntax  of  st.  II  is 
undoubtedly  mere  slovenliness:  the  stanza  shall 
go  the  way  of  the  ungirt  loin.  Also  st.  vii  is  as 
you  say  turgid,  and  must  go,  even  though  it  drag 
with  it  the  next  stanza,  which  you  like.  As  regards 
the  suspension  of  the  sense  in  sts.  iv-vi  I  cannot 
agree.  It  seems  to  me  that  the  breathlessness  and 
holding-aloof  is  justified  by  the  emphasis  with 
which  the  concluding  thought  is  thus  given,  and 
still  more  by  the  fact  that  it  sets  the  essential 
thought  off  in  a  rounded  form.  It  has  a  construc 
tive  value,  also,  as  contrasting  with  the  simple 
declaratory  forms  of  statement  which  precede 
and  follow  it.  I  fancy  it  corresponds  in  my  mind 

62 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

somewhat  to  an  "  organ-point "  in  yours.  The 
adjectives  are  too  many,  I  know;  but  I  am  a 
little  cold-blanketed  and  worried  over  your  spe 
cific  objections  to  phrase.  "  Paltry  roof  "  is  paltry, 
I  freely  admit;  "wind-control"  and  "  moon  ward 
melodist"  are  rococo  as  hell.  But  the  other  three 
to  which  you  take  exception  I  am  sure  are  good 
poetry.  ...  I  think  —  pardon  the  egotism  of 
the  utterance  (you  would  if  you  knew  what  tears  of 
failure  have  gone  to  water  the  obstreperous  little 
plant)  —  I  think  you  are  not  tolerant  enough  of 
the  instinct  for  conquest  in  language,  the  attempt 
to  push  out  its  boundaries,  to  win  for  it  continu 
ally  some  new  swiftness,  some  rare  compression, 
to  distill  from  it  a  more  opaline  drop.  Is  n't  it 
possible,  too,  to  be  pedantic  in  the  demand  for 
simplicity?  It's  a  cry  which,  if  I  notice  aright, 
nature  has  a  jaunty  way  of  disregarding.  Com 
mand  a  rosebush  in  the  stress  of  June  to  purge 
itself;  coerce  a  convolvulus  out  of  the  paths  of 
catachresis.  Amen! 

W.  V.  M. 

Please  be  good-natured  and  talk  back.   Or  no, 
don't.  Spare  the  arm. 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

[CHICAGO, 
June  23,  1896.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

The  report  which  you  make  of  your  lack  of 
progress  in  health  casts  a  gloom  over  my  days. 
I  am  about  starting  for  Wisconsin  for  a  week's 
bicycling,  and  the  monstrous  egoism  of  bodily 
vigor  which  I  feel,  possesses  my  soul  with  shame. 
The  thing  for  you  to  do  is  to  come  to  Chicago: 
it  is  the  greatest  health  resort  going  —  mirabile 
dictu.  We  live  on  bicycling,  base-ball,  breezes, 
beer,  and  buncombe,  and  keep  right  chipper 
mostly.  Can't  you  come  out  for  a  while?  We  have 
an  extra  bed-room,  and  if  you  can  stand  bachelor 
shiftlessness  after  the  golden  calm  of  Milton 
housekeeping,  we  could  put  you  up  "snugly." 
The  quotation  marks  are  only  a  warning  as  to  the 
point  of  view.  Expense  need  be  no  deterrent. 
Walking  is  good  all  the  way,  and  hand-outs  rich 
and  plentiful.  Think  of  it  seriously.  We  will  send 
you  back  mens  sana  surely  and  sano  corpore  if  we 
have  luck.  Allons! 

I  have  grown  quite  meek  over  the  verses,  as  I 
thought  I  should.  I  accept  your  strictures  on  the 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

suspended  construction,  with  only  the  lingering 
spiteful  affirmation  that  two  persons  to  whom  I 
read  the  poem  seemed  to  find  far  less  difficulty  in 
following  the  syntax  than  you  assert  as  normal. 
The  alternative  explanations  of  the  discrepancy 
in  judgment  are  both  too  disagreeable  to  pursue. 
At  worst  it  is  only  one  more  failure ;  success  only 
looms  a  little  haughtier,  a  little  more  disdainful 
of  conquest.  Esperance  and  set  on! 

I  have  had  an  enormous  little  adventure  since 
I  wrote  last.  Another  Girl,  of  course.  This  time 
a  Westerner  par  excellence  —  a  Calif ornian,  dating 
mentally  from  the  age  of  Rousseau  and  Chateau 
briand,  with  geysers  and  cloud  bursts  of  romanti 
cism,  not  to  say  sentimentality;  dating  spiritually 
from  the  Age  of  Gold,  or  some  remoter  purity, 
some  Promethean  dawn,  some  first  foam-birth  in 
hyperborean  seas.  She  likes  Gibson's  drawings, 
adores  Munsey's,  and  sings  "Don't  be  Cross, 
Dear"  with  awful  unction.  After  this  you  will 
not  believe  me  when  I  say  that  she  gave  me  the 
most  unbearable  shiver  of  rapture  at  the  recogni 
tion  of  essential  girlhood  that  I  for  a  long  time 
remember.  Well,  have  you  ever  slept  under  the 
same  roof  with  such  a  person,  in  the  country,  and 
wakened  at  that  moment  before  dawn  when  in 

65 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

the  "spectral  uncompounded  light"  the  spirit  is 
least  capable  of  defense,  when  it  feels  only  a 
membrane  separating  it  from  the  shock  of  joy 
and  woe  as  they  stream  from  the  passionate  day- 
spring,  and  have  you  felt  the  sense  of  that  com 
mon  shelter  like  a  caress,  heard  through  walls  and 
doors  the  rise  and  fall  of  her  breast  as  an  ineffable 
rhythm  swaying  the  sun?  If  you  have  you  can 
realize  the  gone  feeling  that  possessed  me  when 
she  said  (interpreting  my  own  gloomy  guess)  that 
my  kind  was  not  her  kind,  that  my  language  was 
not  her  language,  and  that  her  soul  could  only  be 
studious  to  avoid  mine,  as  the  bird  flying  south 
ward  in  spring  avoids  the  hunter.  I  bowed  assent 
and  came  home.  I  now  nurse  memories  and  grow 
elegiac.  Come  to  Chicago! 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

CHICAGO, 
July  14,  '96. 

T turned  up  bright  and  early  for  his  fifteen 

dollars,  and  continues  to  pay  us  little  friendly 
visits  from  time  to  time.  He  now  has  his  eye  on 
the  Civil  Service.  The  Civil  Service  has  not  yet 

66 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

got  its  eye  on  him,  but  may  in  the  fullness  of 
time.  .  .  . 

It  has  been  unspeakably  hot  —  life  a  tragedy 
and  a  tongue-lolling  —  flat  7  a  place  of  penance, 
teaching  a  Dantesque  farce.  Pray  for  us,  thou 
godless  happy  Loafer. 

Please  give  my  kindest  regards  to  Ida.  I  have 
for  many  weeks  had  it  in  my  mind  to  try  to  phrase 
my  gratitude  for  her  very  bully  tolerance  of  our 
loudnesses  and  other  iniquities  this  winter.  Some 
day  I  shall,  believe  me;  I  speak  with  the  arrogance 
of  the  professional  rhetorician  in  daily  need  of 
defence  against  an  inner  conviction  that  he  is  the 
dumbest  of  God's  creatures. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

CHICAGO,  July  17,  1896. 

I  find  that  the  West  cries  out  as  with  one  voice 
for  the  feathers  and  furbelows  of  feeling  that  you 
Cambridge  mode-makers  consigned  to  the  garret 
decades  ago.  They  're  a  little  bedraggled  at  times, 
but  we  wear  them  with  an  air!  Rousseau  would 
weep  over  us  —  Chateaubriand  would  call  us 
brother.  I  wonder  if  Rousseau  and  Chateaubri- 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

and  were  as  ridiculous  after  all  as  they  seem  from 
the  serene  middle  of  Harvard  Square? 

All  this  is  of  course  (I  mean  this  sentimentaliz 
ing  and  toy-sea-sailing)  by  way  of  "compelling 
incident."  That  is  the  most  illuminating  and 
fruitful  phrase  you  ever  gave  me.  Every  hour 
that  I  pilfer  from  tedium  I  thank  the  lips  that 
framed  it.  Alas!  the  better  ways  of  gilding  the 
grey  days  slip  from  me.  Apollo  has  gone  a-hunt- 
ing  and  I  was  n't  asked.  I  have  hung  my  harp 
on  a  willow,  where  it  gathers  rust  and  caterpillars 
with  a  zeal  it  lacked  in  a  better  cause.  I  am  gone 
stark  dumb.  I  rap  myself  and  get  a  sound  of 
cracked  clay.  A  white  rage  seizes  me  at  times, 
against  the  pottering  drudgery  that  has  fastened 
its  lichen  teeth  on  me  and  is  softening  down  my 
"  crisp  cut  name  and  date."  I  echo  poor  Keats's 
cry  "O  for  ten  years  that  I  may  steep  myself  in 
poetry"  —  with  the  modest  substitution  of  weeks 
for  years,  and  a  willingness  to  compromise  on  as 
many  days  if  Providence  will  only  undertake  to 
get  this  shiny  taste  of  themes  and  literary  drool 
out  of  my  mouth,  and  let  me  taste  the  waters  of 
life  where  they  are  near  the  well-head.  To  go  a- 
brook-f  olio  wing  —  O  happiness,  O  thou  bright 
Denied!  W.  V.  M. 

68 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 


To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

[CHICAGO, 
July  20,  1896.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

The  confident  tone  of  your  last  letter  puts  me 
in  conceit  with  life  again.  Envisage  the  theme  job 
with  the  comic  or  the  tragic  mask,  as  you  please, 
but  not  with  the  features  sweet  Nature  gave  you 
—  on  your  life.  I  am  known  in  the  Chicago 
themery  as  the  Man  in  the  Iron  Mask,  and  you 
may  wager  I  live  up  to  the  title.  The  chance  of 
luring  you  out  here  in  August  tempts  me  to  lie 
goldenly  about  the  musical  prospects.  Now  that 
I  have  the  strength  I  hasten  feebly  to  falter  that 
they  are  damn  poor.  Not  that  Chicago  is  not 
" musical"  —  it  is  amazingly  and  egregiously  so. 
Calliope  is  the  one  Muse  we  recognize,  and  she 
has  a  front  spare  bedroom  and  unlimited  pie. 
But  the  place  is  overrun  with  music  teachers  — 
chiefly  foreign  —  whereof  I  find  recorded  the 
names  of  unbelievable  thousands.  The  Univer 
sity  does  not  yet  boast  a  Department  of  Music, 
though  one  hears  rumors  of  millions  ripe  to  drop 
at  the  summons  of  One  Elect.  If  you  feel  the  star 
quite  distinct  above  your  brows,  you  might  prac- 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

tice  crooking  your  little  finger  with  the  proper 
imperial  persuasion. 

You  don't  tell  me  anything  about  people.  I 
have  become  a  frowsy  gossip,  and  cannot  live 
without  my  pill  of  personalities  sweetly  com 
pounded.  To  punish  you  for  the  neglect  I  enclose 
a  reaction  on  a  recent  notable  Experience.  Hire 
an  amanuensis  for  seven  hours  and  talk  out  a 
sufficing  bundle  of  pages  on  the  mystical  differ 
ences  between  This  and  That,  and  send  the  bill 
along  with  the  bundle. 

WILL. 

P.S.  Before  reading  my  poor  little  reaction, 
do  me  the  justice  to  abstract  yourself  for  twelve 

hours  from  the  society  of ,  —  to  whom,  by 

the  way,  I  send  my  warmest  regards.    I  have 
just  enjoyed  his  article  in  the  Chap  Book. 

The  "reaction  on  a  recent  notable  Experience"  here 
referred  to  was  rejected  by  Moody  when  he  came  to 
make  up  the  "Poems"  of  1901  — for  what  reason  is 
not  very  evident.  Mrs.  Moody  says  that  he  felt  that 
"The  Golden  Journey"  made  it  superfluous.  The 
style  of  the  two  poems  is  doubtless  somewhat  similar, 
but  "Dawn  Parley"  has  a  simple  directness  and  a 
poignancy  that  the  other  lacks.  At  any  rate  there  can 
be  no  harm  in  reprinting  it  here  as  an  excellent  example 
of  its  author's  earlier  manner. 

70 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 


DAWN   PARLEY 

I  WOKE  upon  the  edge  of  day, 
The  east  was  wild  with  racing  light, 
All  meek  and  wild  my  spirit  lay 
Star-shaken  with  delight. 

I  said,  "This  moment  she  doth  wake 
Within  the  chamber  next  but  one, 
She  sees  the  morning-glory  shake 
Its  trumpets  to  the  sun." 

A  bird  that  had  his  headstrong  say 
Outside  my  casement,  frilled  and  went; 
All  wild  and  wan  my  spirit  lay 
With  sudden  anguish  rent. 

For  yesternight  I  laid  my  brain 
And  all  my  soul's  dim  banded  powers 
Open  to  her,  who  said,  "  'T  is  plain 
Thy  ways  are  none  of  ours." 

"Though  nobly  good  to  thine  and  thee, 
To  us  thy  ways  are  strange  and  drear; 
I  go  with  my  sweet  friends  to  be, 
And  thou  must  tarry  here." 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

Above  the  hurry  of  the  light 
All  meek  and  wild  my  spirit  hung, 
From  the  far  hills  I  scared  the  night 
And  in  the  zenith  sung, 

"O!  playmates  of  her  heedless  hours, 
Her  eyes  ye  nevermore  may  see : 
My  brain  and  all  my  soul's  dim  powers 
Possess  her  utterly/' 

W.  V.  M. 
July  1 8,  1896. 

To  Mrs.  C.  H.  Toy 

[CHICAGO,  August  n,  1896.] 
As  for  Chicago,  I  find  that  it  gives  me  days  or 
at  least  hours  of  broad-gauge  Whitmanesque 
enthusiasm,  meagrely  sprinkled  over  weeks  of 
tedium.  The  tedium  is  not  of  the  acid-bath  sort, 
however.  Genuinely,  I  feel  mellower,  deeper- 
lunged,  more  of  a  lover  of  life,  than  I  have  ever 
felt  before,  and  the  reason  is  that  I  have  had  long 
somnolent  spaces  in  which  to  feel  the  alchemy  of 
rest.  I  am  writing,  not  much,  but  with  time 
enough  to  listen  for  the  fairy  echoes,  to  turn  and 
taste  again,  to  fix  and  prefer.  I  shall  never  have  a 
lordly  shelf-full  of  books  to  point  to  ("  Paint  my 

72 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

two  hundred  pictures,  some  good  son!")  but  if  I 
live  out  the  reasonable  span,  I  think  I  can  hope 
to  have  one  little  one  at  least,  or  two  maybe, 
which  will  be  in  their  own  way  vocal  from  cover  to 
cover.  Whether  the  voice  will  be  one  that  people 
will  care  to  hear,  matters  less  to  me  than  it  did  — 
perhaps  less  than  it  should.  Safely  stowed  in  my 
gum-cell,  with  my  globule  of  amber  honey,  I  find 
it  easy  to  forget  Leviathan  and  his  egregious 
spoutings.  He  begins  to  seem  the  least  bit  comical, 
Leviathan,  from  the  gum-cell  outlook.  The  fact 
that  we  and  our  cell  could  hang  unobserved  on 
one  of  his  eyelashes,  does  n't  negate  our  import 
ance  in  the  least.  .  .  . 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

CHICAGO,  August  16,  1896. 
DEAR  ROB: 

The  Morgenthau  message  was,  as  you  with 
characteristic  charity  surmise,  of  friendly  import. 
It  is  only  natural  that  the  terse  impassioned 
utterance  of  great  minds  under  stress,  should  have 
floored  the  telegraph  operator.  Hard  luck  that 
your  summer  should  have  got  away  from  you 
with  so  little  to  show  in  the  way  of  essentials  — 

73 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

by  which  I  do  not  need  to  say  I  mean  alluvial 
soaks  and  happy  drools,  rather  than  land  travel 
and  seafaring. 

Chicago  has  been  a  woe  and  a  bitterness  this 
summer.  Both  Ferd  and  I  hate  the  shop  and  all  it 
contains  with  a  physical  hatred.  We  are  looking 
for  the  man  who  said  the  summer  was  cool  and  a 
good  time  to  work.  .  .  . 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

[CHICAGO, 
August  27,  1896.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

So  far  from  considering  your  letter  "merely 
silly  "  I  found  it  really  stirring  —  at  least  after  I 
got  over  my  amusement,  which  you  must  grant 
to  the  weakness  of  the  flesh.  The  chief  reason  why 
I  have  not  replied  sooner  is  (prepare  to  be  shocked 
beyond  speech)  that  I  have  been  trying  to  make 
up  my  mind  which  side  has  the  least  injustice  and 
unwisdom  to  its  account  in  this  matter.  Living 
here  in  the  heart  of  the  debtor's  country  I  have 
come  to  see  that  the  present  regime  cannot  possi 
bly  endure.  Free  silver  is  undoubtedly  a  desper 
ate  remedy  —  perhaps  an  insane  one ;  but  the  slow 
asphyxiation  which  the  vast  farming  population 

74 


WILLIAM  VAUGHN   MOODY 

of  the  West  is  undergoing  from  the  appreciation 
of  deferred  payments  on  their  gigantic  mortgage 
debt,  due  to  the  inadequacy  of  the  maximum 
gold  coinage  to  keep  pace  with  the  growth  of 
values  —  calls  for  immediate  relief  of  some  sort. 
I  have  seriously  thought,  had  indeed  before  you 
wrote  seriously  thought,  of  doing  a  little  stump 
ing  during  the  fall  vacation,  but  on  which  side  my 
voice  and  vote  will  fall  is  still  a  matter  of  debate 
with  me.  This  is  the  utmost  abyss  and  downward 
of  my  recreancy. 

I  envy  you  your  feverish  and  on-the-whole 
delightful  visitings  with  a  poisonous  tin-green 
envy.  I  have  about  got  my  mouth  full  of  western 
heartiness  and  uniplexity,  and  long  for  the  lands 
of  purple  haze  and  wicked  goat-shanks  of  apo 
thegm  footing  it  after  the  shy  fluttered  robes  of 
dryad  metaphor.  Abbott  Thayer  must  be  a  daisy : 
tell  me  about  him.  O  to  walk  in  a  far 
sweeter  country,  among  dim  many-colored 
bushes!  O  now  to  drink  a  brown  drop  of  happi 
ness  with  my  good  friend !  Selah ! 

I  note  with  grief  the  catalogue  of  black-prowed 
ships  the  Gods  have  winged  with  disaster  against 
your  spirit's  Troy.  Anxious  counting  will  not 
seem  to  make  them  fewer.  I  would  urge  you 

75 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

again  to  brave  the  blustering  rigors  of  the  west, 
if  it  did  not  seem  such  abandoned  selfishness  to  do 
so.  For  me  to  go  East  now  would  not  only  be  to 
"break  a  trace,"  but  to  break  for  a  hasty  feast  the 
little  pot  of  honey  I  have  stored  up  by  much 
noon-day  toil  to  serve  for  a  long  long  starveling 
joy  next  summer  and  the  winter  after.  I  shall 
only  be  able  to  pull  through  the  winter  on  the 
prospect  of  nine  months  of  golden  liberty  at  the 
end  —  the  epithet  being,  let  me  hasten  to  add, 
notably  metaphorical. 

The  Singer  refuses  to  comfort  my  exile  with  so 
much  as  a  shed  feather  of  song.  My  letters  lie 
unanswered  and  my  tear-bottles  cumber  the 
Dead-Letter  Office.  Wherefore  are  these  thusly? 
Ah  me,  to  walk  in  a  country  of  dim  many-colored 
bushes,  beside  bright-breathing  waters!  To  hear 
the  shy  bird  that  woke  at  evening  in  the  breast 
of  my  friend !  Selah. 

I  was  glad  to  hear  you  liked  the  Atlantic  article. 
I  am  in  a  state  of  rawness  and  jealousy  when  praise 
of  even  a  pot-boiler  makes  me  lick  the  hand  of 
the  giver.  Desperate  is  the  pass  of  all  little  Gods 
who  say  after  the  sixth  day,  "This  is  my  handi 
work,  and  lo,  it  is  mostly  Lolly-pop!" 

Divinely  yours,  W.  V.  M. 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

AUGUST  30  [1896?]. 

Are  n't  you  ever  going  to  speak  to  me  again? 
Is  my  back-yard  left  irremediably  desolate?  Have 
your  rag  dolls  and  your  blue  dishes  said  inexorable 
adieu  to  my  cellar-door?  The  once  melodious 
rain-barrel  answers  hollow  and  despairing  to  my 
plaints  —  but  for  that  the  summer  is  mute. 
What  have  I  done?  What  have  I  left  undone? 
Alas,  these  questions  are  the  ancient  foolishness 
of  the  Rejected.  Forgive  me  that  the  rejected  are 
foolish,  but  tell  me  my  sin.  But  a  little  while  ago 
you  were  my  intercessor  with  one  whom  I  had 
inscrutably  offended,  and  now  you  visit  upon  my 
head  inscrutable  doom.  Imagine  the  panic  of  a 
spider  who  has  anchored  his  web  to  the  pillars  of 
the  firmament  and  discovers  of  a  sudden  that  they 
are  the  spokes  of  a  bicycle  in  active  requisition. 
Such  a  one  so  smote  me  yesterday  with  his  alle 
gory  that  I  plucked  him,  silky  ruin  and  all,  from 
his  fool's  paradise,  and  deposited  him  among  the 
comfortable  rafters.  Will  you  be  outdone  in 
charity?  My  web  is  a  sight  —  and  Messieurs  the 
flies,  once  my  toothsome  prey,  beleaguer  me, 
buzzing  annihilation.  W.  V.  M. 

77 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

Categorically,  I  crave  answer  to  the  following 
questions :  — 

1.  Where  are  you  to  be  next  year? 

2.  What  are  you  going  to  do  there? 

3.  Where  have  you  been  this  summer? 

4.  What  did  you  do  there? 

5.  What  are  your  latest  opera?  (a  ms.  copy  of 
same  should  accompany  reply.) 

6.  What  are  your  contemplated  opera?   (May 
be  omitted  for  cause.) 

7.  Are  you  happy? 

8.  Are  you  well? 

9.  Are  you  still  friends? 

N.B.  Please  answer  the  questions  in  the  order 
given.  Use  only  plain  idiomatic  English.  You 
will  be  judged  by  both  the  quality  and  the  quan 
tity  of  your  writing. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

CHICAGO, 

November  24,  1896. 
DEAR  DAN: 

So  far  from  being  able  to  "  dartle  a  ray  of  poesy  " 
into  your  world,  I  contrast  the  vivid  glow  of  that 
world  as  set  forth  in  your  letter,  with  the  kennel 
I  inhabit,  in  a  spirit  of  blank  misgiving.  Fourteen 

78 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

consecutive  months  of  hack  teaching1  have  left 
me  in  a  state  of  spiritual  beggary  I  never  dreamed 
of,  and  the  seven  months  that  still  roll  their 
vermiform  length  before  me  sometimes  startle  me 
into  a  Bedlam  query.  The  uncourageous  truth 
must  be  told,  that  I  have  got  already  to  the  lees 
of  my  resisting  power,  and  at  the  best  can  only 
crawl  stricken  and  tolerated  to  the  latter  end. 
The  spirit  of  selection,  the  zest  of  appropriation, 
is  gone  out  of  me.  For  a  more  instant  misery,  I 
must  give  up  my  Christmas  trip  east,  to  which 
my  rheumy  eyes  have  long  been  straining  for 
light.  A  new  course  to  read  for,  and  a  pinching 
poverty,  are  the  main  reagents  in  this  stinking 
bit  of  chemistry ;  at  the  black  bottom  of  the  retort 
lieth  Little  Willy's  calcined  pebble  of  a  heart. 
Sing  a  song  of  willow.  Strew  on  him  sawdust, 
sawdust,  with  never  a  hint  of  goo.  Convey  a  poor 
devil's  plangent  gratitude  to  your  mother  and 
your  sister-in-law  for  their  offered  hospitality. 
This  reminds  me  —  how  did  Mrs.  Milton  Mason 
get  it  into  her  head  that  she  had  offended  me? 
Let  her  know  that  in  my  present  state,  perhaps 
in  any  state,  a  snub  or  a  cuffing  from  her  likes 
would  be  unto  me  as  rarest  hydromel,  since  after 
1  That  is,  since  October,  1895. 

79 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

all  even  a  snub  or  a  cuffing  constitutes  a  sort  of 
bond.  The  blue  beatitude  of  those  Milton  hills 
often  yearns  into  the  grey  drift  over  Chicago 
roofs,  and  I  hear  thence,  even  in  the  midst  of 
cable-car-gongs  and  elevator  chains,  a  spectral 
hymnody.  .  .  . 

Your  statement  of  your  musical  condition  fills 
me  with  sorrow  and  wrath.  Your  letter  reached 
me  just  as  I  was  starting  for  the  Friday  afternoon 
Symphony  rehearsal,  and  darkened  for  me  this 
one  flower  of  passion  and  color  that  still  blooms 
where  the  city  of  my  soul  once  was.  But  in  the 
midst  of  a  Schumann  thing  my  eye  wandered  to 
the  program  and  read  there  the  story  of  his  being 
turned  by  just  such  a  misfortune  as  yours  into  the 
work  which  was  so  gloriously  his  to  do.  Of  course 
you  know  the  story,  but  I  could  hardly  help 
sitting  down  at  once  and  calling  upon  you,  be 
seeching  you  to  think  of  it  again.  For  you  to  give 
up  music  for  "letters "  is  for  an  oyster  to  renounce 
pearl-making  in  order  to  devote  its  energies  to 
the  composition  of  sea-weed  pills.  I  hasten  to 
add  that  this  is  n't  saying  a  damn  against  the 
pills. . . . 

W.  V.  M. 


80 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Mary  L.  Mason 

CHICAGO. 
Jan.  14,  1897. 
MY  DEAR  MRS.  MASON,  — 

Believe  me,  I  was  not  nearly  so  unheedful  of 
your  Song  of  the  Milton  hills,  as  my  silence  has 
seemed  to  say.  The  two  or  three  days  which  I 
spent  at  your  house,  with  those  hills  for  back 
ground,  taught  me  their  power  of  saying  "Be  still 
and  know."  Those  few  days  stand  out  with  a 
singular  lustre  —  no,  that  is  hardly  the  word  — 
with  a  quality,  a  timbre,  which  often  surprises  me 
with  its  recurrence  and  residence.  Please  don't 
suspect  me  of  "  registering  sensations, "  but  this 
mysterious  wilfulness  of  the  memory  in  aggran 
dizing  this  experience  and  annulling  that,  out  of 
all  reason  and  proportion  so  far  as  one  can  judge 
from  the  outside,  often  sets  me  wondering  who  is 
boss  of  me,  anyhow.  Whoever  he  is,  in  this  par 
ticular  instance  I  submit  cheerfully  to  his  dictum. 

As  Dan  may  have  told  you  I  have  been  liv 
ing  a  rather  shrouded  existence  of  late,  owing  to 
many  circumstances  which  are  hardly  worth 
retailing  one  by  one,  but  which  in  the  mass  make 
up  a  very  respectable  incubus.  My  term  of  dur- 

81 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

ance  in  the  academic  stocks,  however,  has  been 
sensibly  shortened:  I  expect  to  get  on  to  Boston 
before  the  end  of  April,  to  meet  some  of  God's 
people  once  more  before  setting  out  for  God's 
country.  Is  n't  it  singular  that  really  good  humans 
all  seem  like  emigrSs,  trying  bravely  but  rather 
forlornly  to  persuade  themselves  that  the  land  of 
their  adoption  is  the  land  of  Heart's  Desire?  By 
which  sapient  query  you  can  gauge  the  state  of 
my  nervous  reservoirs:  a  whining  sentimentality 
such  as  that  can  only  be  excused  or  accounted  for 
by  the  nigh  yawning  of  the  ineloquent  tomb. 

I  will  not  try  to  thank  you  for  your  multiplied 
kindnesses,  of  which  your  letter  was  not  the  least. 
Always  earnestly  yours, 

WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

[CHICAGO, 
Feb.  23,  1897.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

Your  letter  arouses  my  conscience  from  the 
daze  into  which  I  some  months  ago  drugged  and 
sand-bagged  it  in  order  that  it  might  not  interfere 
with  the  performance  of  meaner  but  more  press 
ing  duties  than  the  ones  it  clamored  of.  I  have 

82 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

treated  my  friends  shamefully,  though  every  day 
I  see  more  clearly  that  they  are  the  principal 
thing,  and  that  without  them,  or  at  least  without 
the  sense  of  them  in  the  background,  life  would 
be  but,  as  we  are  informed  on  good  authority  it  is, 
a  Vale  of  Tears.  I  have  been  rather  ashamed  to 
write  for  one  thing,  for  fear  of  revealing  my 
barrenness,  but  if  one  hath  only  a  clout  to  his 
breech  should  he  therefore  hide  him  forever  in  a 
dog-hutch?  Thus  spake  Zarathustra.  This  quarter 
I  have  been  held  down  to  business  with  particular 
attentiveness  on  the  part  of  the  divine  chastener 
of  my  spirit :  besides  my  theme  work  I  have  been 
giving  a  course  in  the  seventeenth  century  poets, 
reading  in  them  all  night  and  writing  lectures  on 
them  all  day.  Good  fun,  and  I  have  made  some 
rare  finds  —  of  which  expect  to  hear  more  anon  — 
but  rather  hard  on  one's  tire.  I  hasten  to  assure 
you  that  I  am  as  yet  unpunctured,  though  much 
worn  at  the  rim,  and  rapidly  losing  resiliency 
through  leakage.  I  relinquish  the  figure  with 
reluctance.  .  .  . 

I  can't  tell  yet  whether  I  shall  get  on  to  Boston 
before  sailing.  I  fear  not,  as  I  can  get  very  cheap 
rates  east  on  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio,  and  my 
steamer  (Anchor  Line  to  Naples)  is  apt  to  up  and 

83 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

sail  any  old  day  after  I  get  away  from  here,  thus 
making  the  extra  trip  to  Boston  a  very  hurried 
one  at  best.  Moreover,  in  my  present  tan-bark 
state  of  soul  I  should  be  as  dull  to  you  as  I  am  to 
myself.  In  any  case  I  shall  stop  for  a  week  or  ten 
days  on  my  return  in  the  fall,  when  I  shall  be 
trailing  clouds  of  glory  of  the  most  diapered 
design,  and  when,  moreover,  the  tennis  will  be 
ripe  enough  to  pull,  to  say  nothing  of  country 
walks  and  things. 


To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

HARVARD  CLUB,  27  WEST  44th  St. 

March  26,  1897. 
MY  DEAR  FRIEND: 

Now  that  I  have  at  last  emerged  from  darkness 
a  riveder  le  stelle,  I  turn  to  you  as  Dante  to  Casella, 
and  beg  at  least  a  word  to  prove  that  Florence 
still  has  true  hearts.  I  am  still  rather  numb  as  to 
brain  and  drab-colored  as  to  soul,  but  I  can  feel 
the  holy  influences  that  wait  upon  him  who  loafs 
beginning  to  purge  me  and  urge  me,  though  I 
tremble  to  say  so  for  fear  of  frightening  back 
their  shy  inquiring  tentacles.  The  thought  of  six 
whole  months  of  acquaintance  with  myself  fills 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

me  with  an  inexpressible  arrogance,  the  likes  of 
which  I  did  n't  suspect  my  meek  pedagogical 
make-up  of.  I  had  promised  myself  for  a  long 
time  a  few  days  tarry  in  Boston  before  sailing, 
but  got  caught  as  usual  between  the  contracting 
prongs  of  time  and  space.  So,  instead  of  the  long 
afternoon  or  afternoons  during  which  I  had  hoped 
to  rummage  the  past  and  peer  into  the  future 
with  you,  here  I  am  with  a  half -hour  and  a  sheet 
of  paper.  Nevertheless,  that  will  suffice  for  the 
cardinal  question  —  How  is  it  with  you?  What  is 
the  news  from  the  Niche?  Won't  you  tell  me, 
through  the  medium  of  Messrs.  Whitby  and  Co., 
5  Via  Tornabuoni,  Florence? 

W.  V.  M. 

During  the  six  months'  trip  to  Italy  and  the  Austrian 
Tyrol  that  Moody  now  made,  he  wrote  "Good  Friday 
Night"  and  the  "Road  Hymn  for  the  Start,"  and 
began  work  on  the  "Masque  of  Judgment."  He 
returned  to  Chicago  in  September,  1897,  and  under 
took,  in  addition  to  his  teaching,  at  the  suggestion  of 
Mr.  Horace  E.  Scudder,  whom  he  refers  to  as  "Uncle 
Horace,"  the  editing  of  the  Cambridge  Edition  of 
Milton's  Poetical  Works. 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 


To  Ferdinand  Schevill 

CASA  FROLLO,  GIUDECCA. 

VENICE,  June  8th,  '97. 
DEAR  FERD: 

I  have  put  off  writing  to  you  from  day  to  day, 
partly  by  reason  of  the  manifold  demands  which 
Venice  makes  on  one's  powers  of  sensation  and 
utterance,  but  principally  by  reason  of  the  delay 
which  my  intimate  connections  with  the  patrician 
houses  of  Milan  failed  to  prevent  in  the  forward 
ing  of  my  negatives.  Here  they  are  at  last,  such 
ones  as  I  have  got  printed:  rejoice  over  them 
duly. 

I  have  been  installed  in  the  Casa  Frollo  with 
the  Lovett  family  for  two  weeks,  and  many 
blessings  have  been  showered  upon  us.  Foremost 
to  be  mentioned  among  Heaven's  gifts  is  a  gar 
den,  green  and  voiceful,  reaching  back  through 
checkered  vistas  to  the  Lagoon  —  a  regularly 
bang-up  place  of  dalliance.  Lacketh  as  yet  a 
laughing  Lalage;  as  yet,  I  repeat,  not  without  a 
sinking  at  the  heart.  Meanwhile  Euterpe  floats 
at  the  ends  of  the  vineyard  alleys,  elusive,  promis 
ing.  The  Good-Friday  theme  has  taken  shape; 

86 


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WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

it  proved  more  modest  in  scope  in  the  working 
out  than  I  had  anticipated,  but  I  am  almost  satis 
fied  with  it  nevertheless.  I  hope  you  may  not 
frown  upon  it,  when  in  the  fullness  of  time  it  is 
chanted  before  you.  I  am  at  work  now  on  a 
rather  hopelessly  fantastic  thing,  I  fear,  half- 
lyric,  half -dramatic ;  I  shall  try  to  excuse  the  wil- 
fulness  of  the  form  by  calling  it  a  Masque.  The 
subject  is  the  Judgment-day  —  no  less  —  a  kind 
of  sketchy  modern  working  over  of  the  theme, 
from  the  point  of  view  of  the  accusing  human. 
God  Almighty  promises  to  be  an  engaging  figure, 
with  proper  foreshortening.  The  protagonist  is 
the  archangel  Raphael,  a  staunch  humanist  (his 
enemies  —  Heaven  confound  their  counsels !  — 
would  say  a  sentimentalist),  and  principal  roles 
are  sustained  by  such  pleasing  characters  as  the 
Seventh  Lamp  of  the  Throne,  the  Angel  of  the 
Pale  Horse,  the  Lion  of  the  Throne,  and  the 
Spirit  of  the  Morning-star.  I  foresee  great  possi 
bilities,  —  a  kind  of  Hebrew  Gotterdammerung, 
with  a  chance  for  some  real  speaking-out-in- 
meeting  —  hoop-la!  —  Excuse  my  barbaric  yawp; 
it  is  merely  meant  to  express  enthusiasm. 

We  keep  a  gondola-slave,  and  make  frequent 
trips  to  the  Lido,  which  however  is  dull  as  yet. 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

The  weather  grows  hot  and  heavy  apace ;  I  fear 
we  shall  have  to  make  a  break  for  the  mountains 
before  long. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

CORTINA  D'AMPEZZO, 
TYROL,  July  15,  1897. 

MY  DEAR  Miss  JOSEPHINE  PRESTON  PEABODY: 
I  have  not  answered  your  unfriendly  and  inade 
quate  letter  sooner  because  I  found  myself  incap 
able  of  mustering  the  amount  of  ill-feeling  which 
I  judged  commensurate  with  the  demands  of  a 
reply.  I  have,  indeed,  given  up  all  hope  of  such 
a  strenuous  accession,  and  have  resolved  merely 
to  hide  the  fountains  of  my  good  will  under  a 
decent  covering  of  recrimination,  throwing  my 
human  longing  for  retaliation  to  the  winds.  I  am 
the  more  moved  to  measures  of  pacification  be 
cause,  in  the  first  place,  my  return  to  New  England 
shores  has  grown  suddenly  more  imminent,  and 
in  the  second,  because  I  hear  news  of  noble  Works 
taking  shape  and  soul  under  your  hands.  It  is  now 
nearly  three  weeks  since  I  fled  here  to  this  sky- 
hung,  cloud-acquainted  village  of  the  Austrian 

88 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

Tyrol  from  the  too  generous  ardors  of  an  Italian 
summer.  I  am  moved  to  harrow  your  literary 
sensibilities  with  "description"  of  these  wind 
swept  valley  pastures,  hedged  in  by  ferocious 
peaks,  and  dowered,  even  to  the  border  of  the 
snow,  with  unimaginable  wealth  of  wild  bloom. 
Tremble  not,  I  will  not  maltreat  a  captive  of 
courtesy.  To  tell  the  ignoble  truth,  as  my  time  of 
liberty  draws  to  an  end,  and  I  see  how  very  little 
I  have  accomplished  in  it,  I  find  myself  trying 
to  shut  out  sensations  which  are  too  poignant  and 
crowding,  in  order  that  I  may  find  the  restfulness 
necessary  for  work.  I  have  arrived  at  a  depth  of 
miserliness  where  it  is  possible  for  me  to  give  up 
a  night  in  the  star-lit  grass  for  a  night  of  lamp-oil 
and  muddy  ink.  Not  that  I  have  done  much,  or 
shall,  I  fear;  but  I  have  a  good  thing  to  do,  when 
it  pleases  Apollo.  I  have  just  had  a  letter  from 
Uncle  Horace,  making  propositions  —  messes  of 
pottage:  it  is  the  reek  and  fatness  thereof  which 
draws  my  Esau-soul  homeward  before  its  ap 
pointed  time  —  perhaps. 

W.  V.  M. 

Address,  care  Whitby  and  Co. 
5  Via  Tornabuoni,  Florence. 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 


To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

ALBERGO  D'ESPAGNA,  VIA  CALZAIOLI, 

FLORENCE,  August  i,  1897. 
DEAR  DAN: 

When  I  found  in  the  batch  of  letters  awaiting 
me  here  this  morning  one  from  you,  remorse,  long 
dozing,  awoke  and  gnawed.  I  have  been  a  monster 
of  taciturnity  and  greedy  possession;  I  have  lain 
on  my  gorgeous  heap  of  sensation  like  Fafnir  on 
the  Glittering  Hoard,  growling  from  my  papier - 
machi  throat  to  all  importunate  duties  and  memo 
ries,  "Lass  mich  fiihlen!  Ich  lieg  und  besitze." 
As  I  count  over  my  rosary  of  Italian  days  —  and 
nights !  —  with  the  little  seed  pearls  and  the 
pearls  of  price  and  the  green  gawdies,  a  sense  of 
profound  pity  for  everybody  else  in  the  world 
invades  my  breast,  —  now  at  least  when  the 
imminent  prospect  of  a  return  to  the  key  of  drab 
sends  over  me  a  sense  of  moral  realities  once  more. 
The  substance  of  your  letter  as  well  as  its  tone 
precipitates  this  floating  compassion  about  your 
self,  a  reaction  of  the  spiritual  chemistry  for 
which  you  will  doubtless  thank  me  as  little  as  I 
should  you  in  a  reversed  case.  That  your  arm 

does  not  pick  up,  that 's  beard  has  again  been 

90 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

known  to  stick  out  straight,  that laughs  a 

hyena  laugh  before  relapsing  into  ambrosial 
silence,  to  say  nothing  of  your  estrangement  from 
the  mint  julep  and  its  realms  of  gold  —  all  to 
gether  constitute  a  desolating  picture  —  so  deso 
lating  indeed  that  I  hesitate  to  communicate  a 
plan  I  had  formed  for  spending  the  month  of 
September  in  Boston.  The  only  scrap  of  comfort 
I  get,  fortunately  an  intensive  one,  is  the  paren 
thetical  assurance  that  you  spend  the  hoarded 
strength  of  your  arm  in  writing  music.  I  have 
never  quite  got  over  the  shock  given  me  by  your 
announcement  six  months  ago  that  music  was 
not  for  you.  There  seemed  something  obscene 
about  such  a  blow  to  your  chance  of  happiness, 
such  a  lopping  off.  I  remember  once  seeing  a  play 
mate  coming  out  of  his  door  on  crutches  after  he 
had  lost  a  foot.  Bah!  my  soul  sickens  yet,  after 
fifteen  years.  These  things  should  not  be  done 
after  these  ways.  My  golden  bath,  my  Semele- 
shower  of  sensation,  has  only  strengthened  my 
conviction  that  the  adventures  of  the  mind  are 
beyond  all  compare  more  enthralling  than  the 
adventures  of  the  senses,  that  no  twining  of 
amorous  limbs  can  bring  the  intoxication  of  the 
airy  grappling  of  the  Will  to  Beauty  with  the 

91 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

feminine  latency  of  thought  toward  being  beauti 
fully  created  upon.  I  hope  that  is  not  as  snarled 
as  it  looks  on  paper,  though  I  know  it's  full  as 
bawdy. 

This  conviction  is  perhaps  the  best  thing  I  have 
to  show  for  my  vacation,  however.  I  observe 
with  sudden  retrospective  dismay  that  I  have 
accomplished  next  to  nothing  in  printable  pages, 
one  or  two  short  poems,  and  a  couple  of  torsoes 
sketched  out  in  the  block,  but  so  big  that  my 
mallet  and  chisel  lose  themselves  in  the  inter 
stices  between  dust  speck  and  dust  speck.  I 
clamber  with  Liliputian  ingenuity  over  the  bulk 
thereof,  spying  out,  very  agile  and  bustling,  with 
horny  eye  apprehensive  upon  cracks  and  preci 
pices.  As  yet  no  planet-displacing  news. 

Remains  to  be  communicated  my  plan  for  Sep 
tember  :  this :  Uncle  Horace  has  had  the  gentilezza 
to  offer  me  a  substantial  job  of  book-editing, 
which  if  I  accomplish  in  due  season  will  insure  me 
another  playing-space  months  earlier  than  I  could 
otherwise  hope  for  it.  I  propose  accordingly  to 
cut  short  off  here,  sail  on  the  iQth  August  for 
America,  reach  Boston  by  the  first  of  September, 
and  spend  the  ensuing  four  weeks  working  in  the 
Boston  and  Cambridge  libraries,  with  seasons  of 

92 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

torso-climbing  and  mint-juleping  generously  in 
terspersed 
Till  when  — 

WILL. 

P.S.  When  you  write  abroad  again  use  tissue- 
paper  and  invisible  ink  and  write  on  both  sides. 
My  disbursements  to  the  Italian  government  and 
the  Postal  Union  on  your  blue-book  amounted  to 
just  eighty-five  (85)  centesimi.  Not  that  it  was  n't 
worth  ninety  (90),  but  thrift  is  thrift. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

N    5488  EAST  END  AVENUE, 

CHICAGO. 
[January  3,  1898.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

My  gratitude  for  your  stout  refusal  to  forget 
my  existence  at  last  forces  me  to  open  my  lips  in 
some  galvanic  sign  of  sentience.  Having  got  them 
unlocked  I  can  do  little  more  than  let  them  gape, 
for  I  have  quite  lost  the  use  and  want  of  speech  — 
at  least  civilized  speech.  I  have  mastered  the 
local  symbols  of  communication  and  can  now 
carry  on  conversation  of  some  length  with  the 

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SOME  LETTERS  OF 

native  population,  but  it  has  been  at  the  ex 
pense  of  my  English.  I  counted  my  vocabu 
lary  last  night  and  discovered  it  to  consist  of 
ninety -three  ^  words.  You  shall  have  them  all, 
if  you  will  promise  not  to  be  reckless  with 
them. 

...  I  am  unable  at  present  to  express  my  emo 
tion  over  your  propaganda  of  my  fame,  in  a  more 
robust  way  than  by  enclosing  the  Good  Friday 
Night.  Jetsam  I  have  n't  a  decent  copy  of,  nor 
time  to  make  one.  I  started  in  today  on  another 
quarter's  work  at  the  shop  —  with  vacation  and 
restored  consciousness  three  months  away.  From 
now  until  April  I  shall  not  have  time  to  say  a 
Credo ;  but  when  the  spring  is  in  the  air  you  may 
look  for  me  to  drop  down  on  you  out  of  the  first 
blue  sky.  ...  Of  " spiritual  encounters"  I  have 
had  —  am  having  —  one;  but  it  is  too  solemn  to 
talk  about,  short  of  midnight  and  the  third  glass 
—  if  then.  .  .  .  This  is  a  sneaking  poor  return 
for  your  good  letters,  but  I  am  dead  tired  and 
tomorrow  is  wash-day. 

WILL. 


94 


WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

CHICAGO. 
Jan.  5,  1898. 

I  have  just  been  telling  Dan  that  the  alms  of 
remembrance  which  my  Cambridge  friends  (the 
term  is  inclusive)  still  bestow  at  feast-time  upon 
me,  are  taken  with  no  less  gratitude  because  the 
lockjaw  which  prevents  me  from  nourishing  my 
leanness  with  them  also  somewhat  impedes  my 
speech.  As  for  the  new  year  you  point  a  hortatory 
finger  at  —  speriamo  !  April  is  only  eighty-eight 
lectures,  forty  committee  meetings  and  several 
thousand  themes  away,  and  then  I  shall  be  for  a 
little  time  my  own  man  again,  with  a  chance  to 
look  about  and  say  "Well!"  Whether  it  is  to  be 
an  expletive  rather  than  a  considering  adverb, 
the  gods  and  several  little  people  have  on  their 
knees.  .  .  . 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

5488  EAST  END  AVE., 

CHICAGO,  Feb.  21,  1898. 
DEAR  ROB: 

Your  letter  and  the  pictures  bring  home  to  me 
my  epistolary  shortcomings  with  a  painful  dis- 

95 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

tinctness.  I  blush  with  shame  when  I  reflect  that 
a  scribbled  postcard  from  Viareggio,  which  you 
probably  never  got,  is  the  only  sign  of  remejn- 
brance  and  gratitude  I  have  made  since  our  good 
times  at  Cortina  and  thereabouts.  But  to  my 
heart  my  heart  was  voluble. 

Thanks  for  the  pictures;  they  fall  cool  and 
lovely  on  an  eye  grown  horny  with  animadversive 
gazing  upon  Chicago  art  and  nature.  I  find  to  my 
considerable  depression  that  Chicago  does  not 
subdue  me  to  her  graces  any  more  masterfully 
than  she  did  two  years  ago.  Indeed,  these  last 
six  months  have  made  me  almost  as  fanatically 
homesick  for  civilization  as  my  former  seven 
quarters  succeeded  in  doing.  I  lay  it,  stoutly, 
to  a  higher  organization  of  the  sensorium,  but  I 
inwardly  suspect  that  it  is  owing  to  a  depleted 
sand.  In  either  case,  release  is  at  hand;  I  leave  in 
less  than  a  month  for  New  York.  I  should  have 
let  you  know  ere  this  that  Spain  is  out  of  the 
question  for  me  this  year.  In  the  first  place  I 
have  n't  the  cash,  in  the  second,  my  Milton  is 
not  yet  completed,  and  in  the  third,  the  climac 
teric,  I  want  to  get  a  little  volume  of  verse  ready 
for  press  before  fall  at  latest.  The  Masque,  of 
which  you  make  friendly  inquiry,  is  so  far  as 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

concretions  go,  much  where  Cortina  left  it;  but  I 
have  thought  about  it  a  good  deal,  and  believe  I 
can  jam  it  through,  with  a  little  leisure.  Why  do 
you  treat  the  novel  with  such  novercal  rigor?  By 
all  means  put  it  out,  before  you  come  back  and 
assume  all  the  stifling  dignities  that  await  you. 

Remember  me  to  Stickney.  I  read  some  of  his 
mss.  the  other  day,  sent  me  by  Savage.  He  has 
certainly  strengthened  much,  but  does  n't  seem 
to  have  quite  achieved  yet  the  synthesis  of  Brown 
ing  with  Verlaine,  at  which  he  manifestly  aims. 

With  warmest  regards  for  Ida  and  the  Bambini 
(O  egregious  plural!)  and  felicitations  upon  your 
own  patriarchal  head,  and  sorrowings  of  spirit 
over  lost  Andalusia, 

As  ever,  WILL. 

The  following  letter  is  undated,  but  as  Mrs.  Marks 
published  her  first  book,  "  The  /Wayfarers,"  in  1898, 
it  may  from  the  internal  evidence  be  assigned  to  the 
early  months  of  that  year. 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

Thanks  for  the  good  tidings;  they  have  shed 
about  me  a  reflected  glow  of  spiritual  bien-dtre  rare 
enough  in  the  procession  of  my  days  to  be  relished, 

97 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

I  tell  you.  Then  It  was  n't  all  reflected  either,  nor 
will  it  altogether  go  with  the  fading  of  the  ink. 
It  is  jolly  that  some  of  us  are  going  to  have  a 
say;  the  elected  one  must  be  spokesman  for  the 
rejected,  and  say  it  with  an  air  and  a  gesture! 
Not  without  responsibility,  in  view  of  the  others, 
listening  glad  but  a  little  jealous,  hoping  to  hear 
it  put  just  their  way,  and  ready  to  lift  protesting 
hands  if  it  is  n't.  I  could  swallow  my  own  little 
hiccough  of  envy  with  a  better  grace  if  I  were 
there  to  dogmatize  over  title  and  title-page,  order 
and  grouping  and  pruning  and  padding.  I  sup 
pose  you  will  have  to  struggle  along  your  unillu- 
mined  way  without  me,  poor  thing ;  but  there  will 
come  a  day  of  reckoning  for  all  shortcomings, 
when  I  crawl  over  your  pages,  horny  eye  animad- 
versive  upon  this  and  that,  antennae  excitedly 
waving.  And  if  all  is  good  and  seemly  without 
and  within,  I  shall  go  away  mollified,  and  there 
shall  be  no  more  drudging  that  day  but  only  joy, 
in  the  kingdom  of  Ants. 

The  jewelled  white  of  the  New  England  winter ! 
Here  it  is  mud  —  sky,  lake,  boulevard,  factory, 
flat,  one  featureless  contiguity  of  Mud  —  to  say 
nothing  of  People  and  their  Insides. 

W.  V.  M. 
98 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

CHICAGO, 
March  13,  1898. 
DEAR  DAN: 

.  .  .  Thanks  for  Dunn's  poem:  I  found  it 
delightfully  rapt  and  Keatsian:  its  vagueness  is 
not  annoying,  for  it  is  the  vagueness  of  youth. 
(I  wish  you  could  see  a  picture  I  have  over  my 
desk  at  this  moment  —  an  Antonelli  da  Messina 
—  a  boy's  face  full  of  mystical  yearning,  set  in  a 
background  of  dim  trees.)  Apropos  of  verses,  the 
Atlantic  has  taken  my  Good  Friday  Night.  The 
Bard  [Miss  Peabody]  tells  me,  with  "valorous" 
tears,  that  Copeland  refuses  to  put  out  her  book 
before  fall,  which  I  suppose  is  preliminary  to  the 
crawl  direct.  Sunt  lachrymae  rerum. 


About  April  i,  Moody  arrived  in  New  York  and  took 
a  room  at  109  Waverley  Place.  He  was  working  hard 
on  his  edition  of  Milton,  but  also  found  time  to  write 
out  the  "Masque  of  Judgment"  in  somewhat  tentative 
and  fragmentary  form.  This  he  read  to  me  in  Boston, 
early  in  June.  He  returned  to  Chicago  for  the  summer 
and  autumn  quarters'  teaching,  spent  the  Christmas 
holidays  in  Boston,  and  in  the  first  days  of  1899  estab- 

99 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

lished  himself  in  New  York  again,  this  time  at  318 
West  57th  St. 


To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

"THE  PLAYERS." 
NEW  YORK,  April  8,  1898. 
DEAR  DAN: 

.  .  .  The  plan  you  outline  for  the  Easter  vaca 
tion  is  so  tempting  that  if  you  had  sprung  it  on 
me  soon  enough  I  suppose  I  should  have  yielded 
to  your  blandishments  and  given  New  York  the 
go-by.  Once  here,  however,  I  feel  that  I  ought  to 
stay.  If  I  mistake  not,  my  lines  are  apt  to  be  cast 
in  these  places  permanently  in  the  not  distant 
future,  and  I  have  a  good  chance  now  to  make 
some  acquaintances  and  learn  the  ropes  of  New 
York  life  against  that  desirable  time.  I  have 
already  met  a  number  of  capital  chaps  here  at  the 
Players,  where  Carpenter  has  kindly  set  me  down 
—  chiefly  playwrights,  not  very  big  ones  I  suspect, 
but  full  of  enthusiasm  and  practical  expedient. 
The  great  thing  about  them  is  that  they  get  their 
things  played,  and  that  sort  of  thing,  begad, 
begins  to  appeal  to  me.  Do  not  believe  me  quite 
recreant  to  ideals ;  Cambridge  and  her  elegiac  air 
seems  still  lovely  and  of  good  report.  But  these 

100 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN  MOODY 

chaps  here,  though  very  moderately  elegiac  and 
of  a  dubious  report,  are  splendidly  American  and 
contemporary ;  and  I  feel  convinced  that  this  is  the 
place  for  young  Americans  who  want  to  do  some 
thing.  (N.B.  I  have  not  enlisted  in  the  marine.) 

...  As  for  yourself,  go  to  Chocorua  by  all 
means,  and  believe  me  with  you  in  wistful  imagin 
ation  when  the  spring  sun  gilds  your  mountain 
tops  and  absorbs  the  spare  goo  from  my  asphalt 
pavements. 

As  ever 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

THE  PLAYERS. 

April  13,  1898. 
DEAR  DAN: 

.  .  .  Thanks  for  the  addresses :  I  shall  certainly 
look  up  Harry.  If  you  know  any  other  good 
people  here,  send  me  their  names  and  where 
abouts  and  a  card  of  introduction.  I  am  going  in 
for  people  now,  having  made  the  discovery  that 
the  average  man  is  among  the  most  unexpected 
and  absorbing  of  beings.  .  .  . 


101 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 


[To  Ferdinand  SchevilL] 

THE  PLAYERS. 

1 6  GRAMERCY  PARK. 

Easter  Sunday  — '98. 
DEAR  FERD: 

I  was  sorry  not  to  see  you  to  say  goodbye, 
though  the  weeks  that  intervene  between  now 
and  July  ist,  when  the  summoning  hour  calls  me 
to  penance,  are  already  shortening  so  visibly  that 
the  ceremony  of  leave-taking  seems  superfluous. 
New  York  I  find  all  I  fondly  imagined,  and  more. 
The  fellows  I  have  met  here  are  immensely  cor 
dial  ;  they  have  set  me  down  at  two  or  three  inter 
esting  clubs  where  I  am  gradually  getting  an 
insight  into  this  wonderfully  virile  and  variegated 
life.  Here  at  the  Players  especialty  there  are  no 
end  of  beguiling  humans.  Most  of  them  are  only 
moderately  elegiac,  to  be  sure,  and  their  allegiance 
to  the  sisters  of  the  sacred  well  is  tempered  by 
their  interest  in  the  genie  of  the  box-office  till; 
but  they  are  splendidly  American  and  contempo 
rary,  and  some  of  them  are  doing  good  work.  I 
dined  last  night  with  the  man  who  did  Tess  over, 
and  the  air  of  getting  things  jammed  through 
which  pervaded  him  is  pleasantly  characteristic 

102 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN  MOODY 

of  the  whole  crowd.  Whatever  the  young  Ameri 
can  art-producer  is,  as  I  see  him  here  in  his 
essence,  he  is  certainly  not  lily-livered.  The  gen 
eralization  is  inspiriting. 

Milton  is  stalking  along  with  his  usual  austerity 
toward  completing  himself,  and  besides  I  get  a 
little  time  for  better  things.  .  .  . 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

CHICAGO,  Dec.  2,  1898. 
DEAR  DAN: 

This  is  an  attempt  to  forestall  your  righteous 
wrath  at  my  ungentlemanly  neglect  of  your  let 
ters,  which  have  been  meat  and  drink  to  me  at  the 
seasons  of  their  arrival  and  for  long  after.  I  will 
accept  any  punishment  except  a  refusal  on  your 
part  to  rejoice  over  the  fact  that  I  am  coming 
to  Cambridge  for  Christmas  week.  Intend  thy 
thoughts  towards  revelry,  for  there  must  be  mad 
times.  Like  a  sick  and  lonesome  gilligalloo  bird 
I  begin  to  think  on  me  native  sugar-cane  swamps, 
and  plume  me  feathers  for  a  flight  thither  where 
the  carnivoristicous  Philistine  invadeth  not  with 
his  pot-gun  of  Important  Business,  and  neither 
moth  nor  dust  doth  corrupt.  Don't  tell  me  you 

103 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

aint  going  to  be  to  home,  for  I  'm  acalculatin'  on 
you  for  my  main  holt. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Mrs.  C.  H.  Toy 

CHICAGO,  Dec.  5,  1898. 
MY  DEAR  MRS.  TOY: 

This  is  to  say  that  I  expect  to  spend  Christmas 
week  in  Cambridge.  ...  I  am  eager  for  the  queer 
inimitable  charm  of  Cambridge,  for  that  atmos 
phere  of  mind  at  once  so  impersonal  and  so  warm, 
for  that  neatness  and  decency  of  you  children  who 
have  been  washed  and  dressed  and  sent  to  play 
on  the  front  lawn  of  time  by  old  auntie  Ding-an- 
Sich,  while  we  hoodlums  contend  with  the  goat 
for  tomato  cans  in  the  alley.  I  have  a  fair  line  of 
the  same  to  lay  before  your  eyes  when  I  am  admit 
ted  inside  the  aristocratic  front  gate :  some  of  them 
will  make  a  fine  effect  in  a  ring  around  your 
geranium  bed. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

[CHICAGO,  Dec.  19,  1898.] 

1.  Arrive  Friday  P.M.  or  Saturday  A.M.   Exact 
time  to  be  communicated  later. 

2.  Will  stay  at  39  with  pleasure. 

104 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

3.  Think  Chocorua  too  risky,  especially  for 
your  purposes  of  recuperation. 

4.  You  shall  loaf,  sir. 

5.  You  shall  go  to  themes  once  more  on  Jan.  2 
in  a  galliard,  and  conduct  consultations  in  a 
coranto. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

318  WEST  57th  ST. 
NEW  YORK,  Jan.  8,  1899. 
MY  DEAR  FRIEND: 

I  put  off  writing  Hail  and  Godspeed  when  the 
Book  came  out  because  I  wanted  to  speak  my 
words  of  pride  and  praise  in  person.  You  were 
not  there  to  hear  them,  and  since  then  I  have 
been  caught  in  the  wheels  of  this  world's  business. 
But  you  cannot  but  believe  me  when  I  say  that 
the  book  gave  me  a  very  keen  delight,  first 
because  it  was  yours  and  second  because  it  was 
the  world's,  and  read  in  cold  type  it  entirely  jus 
tified  my  old  enthusiasm.  Some  things,  which 
seemed  to  me  less  mature  and  less  forthright,  I 
could  have  wished  away ;  and  others  I  could  have 
wished  a  little  nearer  the  every  day  speech:  but 
even  for  these  the  Envoi  made  amende  honorable. 

105 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

What  we  expect  of  you  now  is  to  fulfill  the  pro 
mise  there  made:  to  take  hold  of  the  common 
experience  and  the  common  idiom  and  glorify  it. 
Who  am  I,  to  be  sure,  that  I  should  be  offering 
sage  advice?  Yet  I  hope  you  ask  the  question 
without  sarcasm,  for  after  all  I  am  one  who  has 
loved  the  Muses  well,  and  hoped  much  from  my 
friends,  however  I  may  seem  to  have  forgotten 
both  the  one  and  the  other. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

HARVARD  CLUB. 
87  West  44th  St. 

Jan.  17,  1899. 
DEAR  DAN: 

I  certainly  sha'n't  let  you  off,  now  that  you  have 
been  rash  enough  to  make  advances.  'F  yez  don' 
wan'  the  pants,  w'y  in  hell  'd  you  try  'em  on  fur, 
blokey?  I  answer  your  questions  categorically. 

i.  You  can  see  all  of  me  all  of  the  time  after 
and  including  lunch,  which  I  usually  take  about 
1.30;  from  the  mysteries  of  my  bath,  breakfast, 
and  matutinal  galumphing  o'er  twin-peaked 
Parnassus,  I  shall  exclude  you  peremptorily,  but 
after  1.30  I  am  yours  till  cock-crow. 

106 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

2.  My  luncheon,  consisting  of  a  sandwich  and 
a  drink,  usually  costs  ten  (10)  cents,  unless  I  fre 
quent  a  free-lunch  counter,  when  it  costs  five  (5). 
Since  looking  at  the  expanse  of  cheek  in  the  pic 
ture  which  you  send  (and  for  which  I  thank  you 
kindly)  I  have  about  resolved  to  intermit  lunches 
for  the  time  being.    If  this  sounds  too  Spartan, 
remember  that  a  great  deal  of  Nourishment  can 
be  bought  between  Washington  Square  and  Cen 
tral  Park,  if  you  still  feel  atrophied  after  lunching 
with  me.    For  dinner  I  pay  (including  tip)  from 
sixty  to  eighty-five  cents,  except  on  rare  occasions 
when  I  feel  proud  and  sassy  —  on  which  occasions 
I  sometimes  reach  the  dizzy  and  disastrous  peak  of 
a  dollar  ten. 

3.  The  weather  will  be  fine.  Shut  up,  I  say  it 
will ! 

I  have  n't  touched  the  Masque,1  but  have 
plunged  in  medias  res  with  the  play.2  It  bids  fair 
to  be  short  (perhaps  50  minutes  to  an  hour  to  act) 
but  it's  developing  pretty  well.  I  found  myself 
embarrassed  a  good  deal  at  first  by  the  dull 
monochromatic  medium  of  everyday  speech,  but 

1  That  is,  since  making  the  first  draft  the  preceding  spring. 

2  The  first    draft  of  what  eventually  became   "The  Faith 
Healer." 

107 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

am  getting  more  used  to  it  now  and  find  that  when 
you  do  get  an  effect  in  it  it  is  more  flooring  than 
anything  to  be  got  with  bright  pigments.  I  am 
trying  hard  to  give  it  scenic  structure,  for  as  I 
conceive  it  nearly  half  of  it  will  be  dumb  show; 
at  least  a  great  deal  of  its  effectiveness  will  depend 
on  the  acting.  I  shall  have  it  ready  to  read  to  you 
—  at  least  in  first  draft  —  when  you  appear.  I  Ve 
got  a  Chinese  restaurant  to  show  you  on  Mott 
Street;  likewise  a  Chinese  stew  that  will  make 
your  gizzard  turn  pale  with  joy.  Refusing  to  be 
refused, 

W.  V.  \M. 


To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

[NEW  YORK,  Jan.  31,  1899.] 

[Postal  card.] 

Are  you  going  to  take  those  pants?  It  is 
important  for  me  to  know,  as  there  are  other 
customers.  If  a  hasty  decision  (or  the  necessity 
of  it)  will  prejudice  the  possibility  of  your  coming, 
however,  put  it  off  until  the  ninth  hour.  You'd 
better  come.  Verbum  sapienti.  Pictures  —  music 
—  theatre  —  dives  —  dinners  —  Broadway  — 
Bowery  —  beer — girls —  galoots  —  grippe  —  [the 

1 08 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

last  word  is  stricken  out]  Heaven  foref end !   I  Ve 
just  come  out  of  it. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Ferdinand  Schevill 

THE  PLAYERS. 
1 6  GRAMERCY  PARK. 
NEW  YORK,  Feb.  20,  1899. 
DEAR  FERD: 

The  great  king  Grippe  reigns  in  Babylon,  and 
his  hand  has  been  heavy  on  all  his  subjects  — 
especially  yours  afflictedly.  .  .  . 

Are  you  still  minded  to  woo  the  Muse  under 
these  skies  in  spring?  There  may  be  better  places, 
but  there  surely  are  worse;  and  if  the  Muse 
though  never  so  strictly  meditated  prove  thank 
less,  there  yet  remain  Amaryllis  and  the  tangles 
of  Neaera's  hair.  The  latter  is  usually  a  wig,  but 
very  nicely  tangled  and  adequate  for  most  pur 
poses  of  distraction. 

WILL. 

Address,  318  West  57th  St. 


109 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

ATLANTIC  TRANSPORT  LINE,  S.  S.  MESABA. 

NEW  YORK,  March  n.  [1899.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

This  is  only  a  word  to  say  that  I  have  been 
unable  to  resist  the  very  low  rates  of  passage 
brought  about  by  the  rate-war  between  the  trans 
atlantic  lines,  and  am  off  for  England.  ...  I 
shall  settle  down  and  work  steadily.  .  .  . 

Hastily, 

W.  V.  M. 


To  Ferdinand  Schevill 

36  GUILFORD  ST.,  W.  C. 

LONDON,  April  21.  [1899.] 
DEAR  FERD: 

I  have  been  away  from  London,  hunting  for 
the  wisdom  of  the  thrush,  so  that  your  letter 
reaches  me  late.  I  hasten  to  assure  you  that  you 
need  n't  be  afraid  of  missing  April's  careless  rap 
ture;  it's  warranted  not  to  be  subject  to  draft 
this  year  before  May.  We  have  had  next  to  no 
spring  as  yet,  and  if  you  girded  up  your  pajamas 
and  came  across  next  month  you  would  get  both 

no 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

overture  and  tuning-up.  Seriously,  why  can't 
you?  Fares  are  so  low  that  it's  cheaper  to  come 
than  stay,  and  we  could  have  some  rememberable 
hours:  the  country  promises  to  be  ravishing  in  a 
week  or  two  more,  and  is  already  good.  Walking 
from  Wraysbury  to  Horton  yesterday  (a  distance 
of  2  J  miles  across  the  fields)  I  counted  eleven  sky 
larks,  all  soaring  and  singing  fit  to  break  your 
heart.  .  .  . 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

LONDON,  May  13,  1899. 
DEAR  DAN: 

.  .  .  The  Masque  is  done,  all  but  the  finishing 
touches  and  one  song  which  wont  get  itself  written 
straight.  I  have  one  or  two  small  projects  on 
hand  to  the  pursuit  of  which  I  intend  to  devote 
this  next  month.  .  .  . 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

31  GRADUATE  HALL, 

CHICAGO,  July  5,  '99. 
DEAR  DAN: 

If  I  had  written  to  you  as  often  as  I  have 
thought  of  you,  especially  since  I  heard  of  poor 

in 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

Savage's  death,1  you  would  have  had  no  cause  to 
complain.  The  news  came  to  me  on  the  boat,  and 
came  with  a  strange  solemnity  there  in  the  middle 
of  the  ocean.  I  do  not  know  of  anybody  who  could 
go  beyond  time  —  that  " thing  how  slight!"  2  — 
with  better  hopes  of  contentment  there.  It  must 
have  been  almost  at  the  very  hour  of  his  death 
that  Joe  Stickney 3  and  I  sat  talking  of  him  in  the 
twilight  of  a  Paris  spring  afternoon,  and  reading 
some  of  his  lines  with  certain  hopes  of  the  larger 
though  surely  no  sweeter  or  purer  work  he  was  to 
do  some  day.  I  do  not  know  why  the  death  of  a 
spiritual  man,  at  least  one  who  dies  in  youth,  is  so 
much  more  moving  than  that  of  another.  One 
would  expect  it  to  be  the  contrary  way:  perhaps 
it  is  to  the  true  understanding.  Well,  he  has  left 

1  Philip  Henry  Savage  (1868-1899),  a  contemporary  of 
Moody's  at  Harvard,  who  wrote  poetry  of  remarkable  delicacy 
and  distinction. 

2  "Brother,  Time  is  a  thing  how  slight! 
Day  lifts  and  falls,  and  it  is  night. 
Rome  stands  an  hour,  and  the  green  leaf 
Buds  into  being  bright  and  brief. 
For  us,  God  has  at  least  in  store 
One  shining  moment,  less  or  more. 
Seize,  then,  what  mellow  sun  we  may, 
To  light  us  in  the  darker  day." 

"  Poems"  of  Philip  Henry  Savage.  Small,  Maynard  &  Co.,  1901. 

8  Joseph  Trumbull    Stickney   (1874-1904),  another  Harvard 

poet,  whose  poems  Moody  and  others  edited  after  his  early  death. 

112 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

behind  a  half-dozen  lyrics  that  will  last  as  long  as 
the  nation,  or  longer.  Let  us  be  content  with  that, 
as  he  doubtless  was. 

I  have  no  time  now,  in  the  rush  of  the  opening 
quarter,  to  tell  you  about  myself,  except  to  say 
that  I  heeded  your  admonition  and  "  dropped  a 
book"  as  I  came  through  New  York.1  Macmillan 
is  reading  it.  I  have  n't  much  confidence  that  the 
poor  little  volume  will  ever  see  the  light  under 
such  august  patronage,  but  somebody  or  other 
will  be  found  with  an  eye  to  the  thanks  of  pos 
terity  and  a  proud  contempt  for  the  contemporary 
dollar,  I  hope.  I  shall  know  its  present  fate  in  a 
few  weeks  and  will  let  you  know  promptly. 

As  for  the  Milton,  it  has  I  believe  been  out 
several  weeks  or  months,  though  I  have  not  yet 
seen  a  copy.  If  you  want  to  learn  what  the  New 
York  Nation  thinks  of  it,  look  in  the  columns  of 
that  sheet  for  the  latter  part  of  April.  It  does  not 
leave  enough  of  me  to  bury.  I  am  told  that  other 
critics  (Literature,  the  Dial,  etc.)  have  been  more 
plenteous  in  mercy,  but  I  have  n't  had  strength 
to  look,  after  the  Nation  man-handling. 


1  This  must  have  been  the  "Poems,"  eventually  published  in 
1901  by  Houghton,  Mifflin  &  Co. 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Mrs.  C.  H.  Toy 

CHICAGO,  Sept.  25,  1899. 
MY  DEAR  MRS.  TOY: 

If  I  were  not  socially  irreclaimable  I  should  have 
told  you  long  before  this  how  when  I  got  back  to 
London  that  home  of  depression  and  tedium  did 
its  accustomed  work  upon  me,  and  how  in  despair 
I  fled  to  the  country,  from  whose  absolute  green 
ness  and  comparative  sunshine  not  even  you  and 
Miss  Goodwin  could  tempt  me.  It  strikes  me 
upon  re-reading  that  sentence  that  I  never 
achieved  such  a  climax  in  the  course  of  my  expres 
sive  life  before,  the  emphasis  falling  the  more 
thunderously  because  of  the  contrast  in  the  un- 
amiable  life  about  me  to  those  gay  and  friendly 
Paris  days.  Especially  that  morning  we  spent  in 
rambling  talk  in  the  Luxembourg  gardens  often 
comes  back  to  me  with  a  quite  peculiar  charm,  for 
which  the  decor  is  not  wholly  responsible,  but 
rather  "the  human  heart  by  which  we  live." 

I  am  looking  forward  with  eagerness  to  Boston 
and  Cambridge  this  winter.  The  longer  I  live  the 
more  grateful  I  feel  for  the  good  and  tried  friends 
that  I  made  there,  and  that  have  so  generously 
borne  and  foreborne.  Earnestly  yours, 

WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY. 
114 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

P.S.  Do  you  know  Lander's  Imaginary  Con 
versation  in  which  a  General  Mavrocordato 
figures?  An  ancestor  of  your  man? 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

THE  QUADRANGLE  CLUB. 
CHICAGO,  September  30,  '99. 

Your  generous  praise  makes  me  rather  shame 
faced  :  you  ought  to  keep  it  for  something'  that 
counts.  At  least  other  people  ought:  you  would 
find  a  bright  ringing  word,  and  the  proportion  of 
things  would  be  kept.  As  for  me  I  am  doing  my 
best  to  keep  the  proportion  of  things,  in  the  midst 
of  no-standards  and  a  dreary  dingy  fog-expanse 
of  darkened  counsel.  Bah!  here  I  am  whining  in 
my  third  sentence,  and  the  purpose  of  this  note 
was  not  to  whine,  but  to  thank  you  for  heart 
new- taken.  I  take  the  friendly  words,  (for  I  need 
them  cruelly)  and  forget  the  inadequate  occasion 
of  them.  I  am  looking  forward  with  almost  fever 
ish  pleasure  to  the  new  year,  when  I  shall  be  among 
friendships  which  time,  and  absence,  and  half- 
estrangement  have  only  made  to  shine  with  a 
more  inward  light;  and  when,  so  accompanied,  I 
can  make  shift  to  think  and  live  a  little.  Do  not 
wait  till  then  to  say  Welcome.  W.  V.  M. 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

THE  QUADRANGLE  CLUB. 

CHICAGO,  Nov.  27,  1899. 
DEAR  DAN: 

...  I  have  been  and  still  am  driven  with  work, 
so  that  when  I  get  a  half-hour's  leisure  I  am  too 
done  up  to  put  one  idea  to  another.  But  a  good 
time  is  coming,  and  right  soon,  thank  God!  I 
shall  be  in  Boston  by  the  end  of  the  Christmas 
holidays  —  and  then  ho !  for  talk  and  talk  and 
talk,  wherein  all  arrears  shall  be  cancelled.  I  am 
on  the  verge  of  a  good  fortune  that  I  hardly  dare 
write  about,  for  fear  the  envious  gods  will  snatch 
it  away.  If  they  do  not,  I  shall  be  yours  not  only 
for  this  spring  but  also  for  the  summer  and  a  good 
slice  of  next  year.  Will  let  you  know  at  once  when 
the  die  is  cast.1  .  .  . 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

THE  QUADRANGLE  CLUB. 

CHICAGO,  Dec.  2nd,  1899. 
DEAR  DAN:  • 

Your  magnificence  in  paying  down  instantly 

1  He  was  enabled  to  take  a  considerable  holiday  from  the  uni 
versity  by  his  receipts  from  the  "History  of  English  Literature" 

116 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

and  royally  for  my  mangy  little  note  compels  me 
to  snatch  another  moment  to  make  a  part  of  it 
clearer.  The  hint  which  I  threw  out  as  to  the 
possibility  of  getting  a  long  "vacation"  (you'll 
see  in  a  minute  that  it  is  n't  to  be  altogether 
vacant)  means,  to  wit,  that  I  am  about  to  con 
clude  negotiations  with  one  of  two  rival  firms  who 
are  equally  convinced  of  my  transcendant  abili 
ties,  for  a  history  of  English  literature  for  High 
Schools.  In  one  case  I  am  to  do  the  whole  of  it 
and  in  the  other  half,  and  I  incline  to  the  latter 
because  of  the  natural  jealousy  I  feel  of  my  time 
just  now.  The  half  of  the  job  I  can  do,  I  think, 
in  the  spare  or  slack  time  of  a  year,  and  have  my 
mornings  pretty  free  for  better  things.  It  will 
bring  me  in  five  hundred  plunks  on  delivery  and 
if  successful  ought  to  constitute  a  source  of  per 
manent  though  small  income.  If  these  negotia 
tions  turn  out  all  right,  and  I  get  the  percentage 
of  royalty  for  which  I  am  stickling,  I  am  going  to 
apply  for  as  long  a  leave  of  absence  as  the  authori 
ties  will  allow  me,  perhaps  a  year  and  a  half,  as  I 
think  I  can  pull  through  that  period  on  what  I 
have  saved  or  can  easily  earn.  The  summer  I  am 

on  which  he  presently  began  work,  in  collaboration  with  Mr. 
Lovett. 

117 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

bound  to  have  though  the  Heavens  fall,  or  rather 
because  they  are  not  going  to  fall  but  remain  as  a 
fittingly  modest  framework  to  the  spectacle  of  my 
felicity. 

Your  conjecture  about  my  work  last  spring 
(with  the  implied  reproof  and  warning)  is  partly 
well-founded.  Not  wholly;  for  though  London 
oppressed  me  brutally  I  worked  the  Masque  out 
to  twice  its  previous  proportions,  and  most  of  the 
new  matter  seems  to  bear  the  test  of  cold  subse 
quent  criticism.  It  is  now  four  times  as  long  as 
when  you  saw  it  in  fragment.  There  are,  counting 
re-writing  and  further  development  here  and 
there,  about  five  hundred  lines  to  be  added,  which 
will  leave  it  about  the  length  of  a  substantial  five- 
act  play  —  large  enough  to  make  a  tidy  volume  by 
itself,  if  I  can  implore  or  coerce  any  publisher  into 
printing  it.  With  the  Schlatter  play l  I  have  done 
little  more.  It  wont  do  as  it  is,  and  I  don't  see  yet 
how  to  go  about  resmelting  it,  though  I  still  be 
lieve  there  is  something  in  it  worth  saving.  This 
will  be  one  of  the  tasks  of  the  winter.  My  heart 
leaps  up  when  I  behold,  A  calendar  on  the  sly.  I 
don't  trust  myself  to  envisage  the  same  with  pre 
pense,  for  fear  of  danger  to  furniture  and  window 

i  "The  Faith  Healer." 
118 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

glass.  Have  just  heard  from  Robinson,1  who  con 
veys  some  lyric  gibberish  of  yours  about  apples 
—  if  that 's  the  word,  I  can't  make  out  his  im 
moral  fist  with  certainty.  .  .  . 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

[Postmarked:  CHICAGO,  Dec.  18,  1899.] 
Put  it  behind  thee,  my  boy ;  't  is  a  device  of 
Satan  —  a  whisper  of  the  Demon  of  Unrest  and 
Seller  of  Dead  Sea  Apples.  For  which  belief  I  shall 
soon  furnish  (viva  voce)  argument.  The  Muses, 
I  groundedly  believe,  reside  at  present  on  an 
obscure  peak  (not  yet  visited)  of  New  Hampshire 
or  Maine;  that  is,  if  they  have  not  already  suc 
cumbed  to  the  attractions  of  Pike's  Peak  or 
Mount  Shasta.  At  any  rate  that's  where  I  pur 
pose  to  seek  them,  and  Europe  be  damned.  I  have 
spoken.  W.  V.  M. 

Moody  arrived  in  Boston  at  Christmas,  and  took  a 
room  in  the  Hermitage,  No.  I  Willow  St.  It  was  here 
that,  as  I  find  recorded  in  my  journal  at  the  time,  he 
finally  completed  "The  Masque  of  Judgment,"  Jan 
uary  25,  1900.  The  "Ode  in  Time  of  Hesitation"  was 
also  written  during  this  period,  and  appeared  in  the 

1  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson,  author  of  "Captain  Craig," 
"The  Town  Down  the  River,"  etc. 

119 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

Atlantic  Monthly  for  May.  In  the  early  spring  he 
established  himself  at  East  Gloucester,  Massachu 
setts,  where  he  wrote  "Gloucester  Moors"  and  the 
"Menagerie,"  and  revised  the  play  dealing  with 
Schlatter,  the  "New  Mexico  Messiah,"  which  he  read 
to  a  group  of  his  friends  at  Falmouth,  Mass.,  in  July. 
During  part  of  the  summer  he  lived  with  his  friend  Mr. 
Truman  H.  Bartlett,  in  Chocorua,  N.  H.  In  October 
he  was  again  settled  in  Willow  St.,  but  in  November 
he  went  to  New  York,  where  he  lived  at  71  Irving 
Place  until  his  return  to  Chicago  in  January,  1901, 
save  for  part  of  the  Christmas  holidays,  spent  with  one 
of  his  sisters  in  Newton,  Massachusetts. 

During  all  this  period,  a  most  important  one  in  his 
poetic  development,  he  had  to  give  a  considerable  por 
tion  of  his  time  to  the  text-book  on  English  literature, 
but  managed  to  keep  his  mornings  largely  free  for 
creative  work.  The  period  is  notable  for  publication 
as  well  as  for  production:  "The  Masque  of  Judgment" 
was  printed  by  Small,  Maynard  &  Co.  in  November, 
1900,  and  the  "  Poems"  appeared  in  May,  1901,  under 
the  imprint  of  Houghton,  Mifflin  &  Co. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

i  WILLOW  ST. 
BOSTON,  March  22,  1900. 
DEAR  ROB: 

I  have  just  finished  the  early  (Pre-Chaucerian) 
portion  of  the  greatest  critical  commentary  of 

120 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

modern  times,  and  in  view  of  my  struggles  there 
with  your  jaunty  proposition  to  have  your  half 
of  the  job  done  by  midsummer,  and  teaching  to 
boot,  fills  me  with  envy.  To  be  sure  I  had  for 
gotten  all  my  Anglo-Saxon  and  never  knew  any 
Middle  English,  and  had  to  grub  like  hell  to  get 
at  the  stuff  in  some  respectably  first-hand  way; 
but  that  this  chapter  should  have  taken  me  six 
solid  weeks  of  my  precious  vacation  breaks  my 
heart. 

•        ••*''•        •        •        •        •         •        • 

As  ever, 

WILL. 
To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

THE  HARBOR  VIEW,  EAST  GLOUCESTER, 

April  6,  [1900.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

I  have  put  off  writing  you  in  order  to  give  this 
place  a  thorough  test  and  report  definitely  upon  it 
as  a  vacation  resort.  I  have  liked  it  from  the  first 
and  like  it  better  the  longer  I  stay.  The  humors  of 
the  harbor  are  many  and  its  picturesqueness  inex 
haustible.  The  moors,  which  stretch  for  several 
miles  to  the  eastward,  are  beautiful  in  color  and 
form,  and  the  coast,  although  not  rugged,  is  very 
diversified.  The  house  itself  is  as  good  a  coun- 

121 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

try  inn  as  I  ever  saw.  .  .  .  There  are  a  good 
many  girls  here  now  and  are  likely  to  be  until 
after  the  Easter  vacation;  but  they  will  let  you 
alone  if  you  insist.  .  .  . 

Let  me  know  at  once  if  you  will  venture  it  for 
the  holidays,  as  I  may  have  to  bespeak  your  room 
in  advance.  I  have  hunted  out  some  glorious 
walks  and  believe  that  —  if  you  can  bring  books 
enough  to  beguile  your  mornings  and  evenings  — 
we  can  have  a  first-rate  time. 

W.  V.  M. 

P.S.  There  is  a  ghastly  piano:  fortunately  it 
is  so  ghastly  that  few  of  our  virtuosi  brave  its 
terrors. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

THE  HARBOR  VIEW 
[EAST  GLOUCESTER,  April  n,  1900.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

The  room  is  all  right,  whether  you  come  Satur 
day  or  Monday.  Perhaps  if  you  want  to  like  the 
place  you  had  better  wait  till  Monday  to  avoid 
getting  your  first  impression  under  the  Sunday 
blight;  but  you  best  know  your  own  fortitude. 
Bring  outing  duds,  of  course:  possibly  a  boiled 
shirt  for  evenings,  if  you  're  haughty.  ...  If  you 

122 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

come  in  the  afternoon,  and  will  let  me  know  when, 
I  will  meet  you  at  the  station.  If  I  am  not  there 
take  trolley  car  which  passes  station,  labelled 
Rocky  (not  Rubber)  Neck,  and  tell  the  conductor 
to  put  you  off  at  the  Harbor  View.  It  is  a  two- 
mile  ride,  over  a  very  tempestuous  road-bed. 
Bring  heavy  shoes,  if  possible  waterproof,  as  the 
moors  are  apt  to  be  dampish  in  the  low  places  and 
we  don't  want  to  have  to  keep  to  the  roads.  A 
cap  is  an  absolute  necessity  for  comfort  in  shore 
tramps. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

HARBOR  VIEW  INN. 
GLOUCESTER,  MASS.,  April  30. 
DEAR  ROB: 

Tomorrow  would  seem  to  be  the  first  of  May, 
and  I  am  sending,  according  to  agreement,  the 
three  chapters  of  the  text-book  which  I  have 
blocked  out.  They  are  in  first  draft  and  I  fear 
not  very  legible  in  all  places,  but  there  is  no  type 
writer  in  this  village  and  I  had  n't  the  heart  to 
copy  those  hundred  and  ten  weary  pages.  You 
can  easily  decipher  enough  to  afford  grounds  for 
a  curse-out. 

123 


rSOME  LETTERS  OF 

I  should  especially  like  to  have  criticism  as 
to  proportion ;  I  find  this  the  most  difficult  mat 
ter  to  gauge  and  adjust.  In  general,  I  realize 
that  the  Anglo-Saxon  chapter  and  the  chapter 
on  the  drama  before  Shakespeare  are  both  too 
long.  I  think  I  can  cut  them  down  some  in  re 
writing. 

I  am  convinced  by  the  part  I  have  done  that 
we  must  make  a  great  effort  to  keep  the  thing 
simple  and  broad.  To  do  this  without  falling 
into  the  stick-candy  style  is  hard;  I  realize 
that  in  many  places  I  have  been  narrow  and 
mixed,  in  my  struggles  to  convey  some  little 
nutriment  of  fact  in  the  kissing-comfits  of  gen 
eralization. 

As  you  will  see  by  the  postmark  I  have  fled 
Beacon  Hill  and  set  up  my  everlasting  rest  by  the 
sea.  This  little  fishing  village  is  a  bewitching 
place,  and  the  country  about,  to  the  extremest 
tip  of  Cape  Ann,  is  as  good  as  Brittany.  .  .  . 

As  ever  yours, 

W.  V.  M. 


124 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Mary  L.  Mason 

HARBOR  VIEW  INN. 
GLOUCESTER,  MASS., 

May  ist,  1900. 
MY  DEAR  MRS.  MASON: 

Gloucester  continues  to  be  almost  too  good  to 
be  true.  Dan  and  I  had  a  capital  ten  days  to 
gether,  but  the  orchestra  was  only  tuning  up  then ; 
now  the  first  theme  is  being  given  out,  high,  high 
in  the  violins.  Pace  Apthorp.1 

Mr.  C is  a  good  man  and  true:  he  scorns 

the  doctrine  that  discretion  is  the  better  part  of 
friendship.   Of  such  are  the  kingdom  of  heaven. 
Earnestly  yours, 

W.  V.  MOODY. 

To  Mary  L.  Mason 

THE  HARBOR  VIEW. 
EAST  GLOUCESTER,  MASS. 
May  16,  1900. 
DEAR  MRS.  MASON: 

Your  invitation  is  very  tempting,  though  as  far 
as  the  Gloucester  spring  is  concerned  I  'm  willing 

1  VV.  F.  Apthorp,  who  was  at  that  time  compiling  the  analyt 
ical  program  books  of  the  Boston  Symphony  Orchestra. 

125 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

to  back  it  for  handsomeness  even  against  the 
Milton  variety.  Promptly  at  9  o'clock  each  morn 
ing  I  put  on  blinders,  stuff  my  ears  with  wax,  and 
strap  myself  to  the  desk,  in  order  to  do  my  day's 
stint  on  a  text-book  on  English  Literature  (God 
save  the  mark!)  which  I  have  to  get  a  certain 
portion  of  done  this  month.  .  .  . 

Faithfully  yours, 
WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 
[Undated.   Probably  May  or  June,  1900.] 
DEAR  DAN: 

I  will  answer  as  categorically  as  you  inquire : 

1st.  I  beseech  you  to  come. 

2nd.  I  will  join  you  at  luncheon  on  the  beach,1 
and  offer  my  services  as  guide,  philosopher,  and 
friend. 

3rd.  I  will  not  read  the  Ode,  the  Faith-Healer, 
nor  any  other  damned  thing  under  the  shining 
canopy.  I  will  talk  with  you,  walk  with  you,  play 
with  you,  and  stay  with  you,  and  so  following;  but 
I  will  not  read  for  you  nor  bleed  for  you.  What 
news  on  the  Rial  to? 

W.  V.  M. 

1  A  small  picnic  party  was  proposed. 
126 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN  MOODY 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

PROUT'S  NECK.  [MAINE.] 

June  23,  1900. 
DEAR  DAN: 

...  The  only  hotel  open  in  the  place  is  this 
one,  the  Checkley,  which  I  tackled  in  despair  after 
knocking  in  vain  at  the  doors  of  several  less  im 
posing  hostelries.  I  was  agreeably  surprised  to 
find  I  could  get  a  small  but  fairly  comfortable 
room  here  for  ten  plunks  per.  .  .  .  The  high 
piazzas  command  a  great  view  of  the  bay  and 
open  sea.  ...  Of  the  eighteen  people  now  here, 
I  am  the  only  one  who  could  be  called  a  star,  but 
there  are  prospects  of  a  more  or  less  stellar  sort 
for  the  immediate  future.  The  place  is  so  roomy 
that  I  don't  believe  the  non-stellar  people  will  get 
on  our  nerves.  ...  If  you  decide  to  come,  as  I 
hope,  the  following  is  the  manner. 

Boat  leaves  India  Wharf  at  7  P.M.  Be  on  hand 
by  6.15  in  order  to  get  stateroom.  Fare  (including 
stateroom)  to  Portland,  $2.00.  Go  to  bed  early, 
for  she  gets  into  Portland  Harbor  long  before 
dawn  and  there  is  thenceforward  a  hell  of  a  noise 
unloading  things.  You  can  stay  in  bed  until  7, 
and  breakfast  on  the  boat.  Take  street  car 

127 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

passing  wharf,  marked  Union  Station,  which  will 
deposit  you  in  front  of  the  ticket  window.  Ask 
politely  the  man  behind  the  window  to  give  you  a 
ticket  to  Scarboro  Beach,  price  sixteen  cents.  At 
Scarboro  Beach  (not  Scarboro  Crossing)  you  will 
find  a  stage  running  to  this  hotel,  a  four  mile  ride 
for  which  you  pay  50  cents.  With  these  few  hints 
to  guide  you,  and  the  exercise  of  your  native 
sagacity  and  presence  of  mind  in  peril,  you  will 
arrive. 

Be  of  good  courage,  and  come.  Don't  forget 
your  bathing  suit. 

Yours, 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

CHOCORUA,  N.  H. 

July  2Qth,  1900. 
DEAR  DAN: 

Immediately  on  my  arrival  I  was  swooped  down 
upon  by  Mr.  Bartlett,  and  soon  transferred  bag 
and  baggage  to  his  house,  where  I  am  living  in 
undisturbed  possession  of  the  upper  story.  We 
get  our  own  breakfast  and  take  dinner  and  supper 
at  the  hotel.  He  wants  me  to  say  that  when  you 
come  next  week  he  hopes  you  will  join  us.  I  think 

128 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

we  could  have  a  very  jolly  time  together.  The 
old  boy  is  in  marvellous  form,  and  stars  the  pass 
ing  hours  with  immortal  phrases. 

As  ever, 

WILL. 

To  Robert  Morss  Lovett 

CHOCORUA,  N.  H. 

Aug.  i8th,  1900. 
DEAR  ROB: 

I  am,  as  you  see,  at  Chocorua,  and  expect  to  be 
here  about  two  weeks  longer.  ...  I  am  working 
now  on  the  Milton  period;  have  it  something 
more  than  half  done. 

I  am  staying  with  a  Mr.  Bartlett,  ex-sculptor, 
art  critic,  and  in  spite  of  all  a  magnificent  old  goat 
and  man  of  God. 

Yours, 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Edmund  Clarence  Stedman 

i  WILLOW  STREET, 

BOSTON,  Oct.  30,  1900. 
MY  DEAR  MR.  STEDMAN: 

I  give  myself  the  pleasure  of  sending,  in  advance 
129 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

of  publication,  The  Masque  of  Judgment,  about 
which  I  wrote  you  a  word  or  two  last  spring. 
Doubtless  you  are  overwhelmed  with  tributes  of 
this  questionable  kind,  yet  I  am  bold  enough  to 
hope  you  will  read  the  book,  even  if  it  remains  in 
your  mind  as  a  symbol  of  grotesquely  ambitious 
11  first  volumes." 

Another  copy,  properly  bound,  will  be  sent  on 
publication,  the  second  week  of  November. 
Believe  me 

Very  earnestly  yours, 
WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

SALMAGUNDI  CLUB. 
14  WEST  i2th  ST.,  N.  Y. 

Nov.  14,  1900. 
DEAR  DAN: 

...  I  am  pretty  lonely  here,  as  Robinson  has 
gone  to  Hoboken  or  Spuytenduyvil  or  somewhere, 
to  live  with  the  goats,  and  I  only  see  him  once  a 
week.  For  a  few  days  I  thought  the  noise  would 
drive  me  wild,  and  I  was  more  than  once  on  the 
point  of  fleeing  back  to  the  Hermitage,  which  by 
comparison  seems  to  the  fond  eye  of  memory 
to  deserve  its  name.  There  are  three  hundred 

130 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

and  twenty-three  hand-organs  and  ninety-seven 
pianos  on  our  block,  and  every  hour  thirty-five 
thousand  drays  loaded  with  sheet  iron  pass  the 
house.  Irving  Place,  you  know,  is  a  quiet  old- 
fashioned  neighborhood,  so  we  are  justly  proud 
of  these  slight  evidences  of  animation. 

The  theatres  (which  are  after  all  what  I  came 
for)  are  good,  and  a  great  resource.  .  .  . 

WILL. 

My  address  is  71  Irving  Place. 

To  Mary  L.  Mason 

THE  PLAYERS. 

1 6  GRAMERCY  PARK. 

NEW  YORK,  Nov.  30,  1900. 

MY  DEAR  MRS.  MASON: 

I  am  sorry  that  you  found  the  upshot  of  the 
Masque  (I  mean  its  main  drift  and  meaning) 
negative  or  destructive.  I  did  not  intend  it  to  be 
so.  For  me  the  kernel  of  the  thing  was  Raphael's 
humanistic  attitude  and  Uriel's  philosophy, 
especially  his  "confession  of  faith"  in  Act  in, 
Scene  II.  The  rest  of  it  was  only  mythological 
machinery  for  exhibiting  the  opposed  attitude 
and  philosophy  —  that  of  the  deniers  of  life.  I 
hoped  that  the  positive  meaning  might  disengage 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

itself  as  a  kind  of  aroma  or  emotion  from  the 
whole,  and  that  the  poem  would  thus  subserve 
just  such  a  brave  love  of  life  and  faith  in  its 
issues  as  you  plead  for.  If  this  does  not  happen 
for  the  sympathetic  reader,  then  I  have  failed 
wholly. 

Your  praise  of  the  manner  of  the  poem  I  am 
grateful  for,  especially  as  it  came  at  a  moment  of 
deep  discouragement.  Believe  me, 

Always  faithfully  yours, 

WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

THE  PLAYERS. 
1 6  GRAMERCY  PARK. 
NEW  YORK,  Nov.  30,  1900. 
DEAR  DAN: 

Your  generous  praise  of  the  Masque  gave  me 
great  joy,  for  I  was  going  through  a  crisis  of  dis 
couragement  which  made  my  months  of  labor  and 
engrossment  upon  it  seem  pitiably  futile.  I  am 
alarmed  about  myself,  when  I  notice  that  the 
fluctuations  of  heaven-scaling  confidence  and 
something  very  like  despair,  instead  of  decreasing 
as  they  ought  to  do,  seem  to  increase  with  my 
years  and  knowledge.  I  don't  understand  it  at 

132 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

all,  nor  do  I  see  any  way  of  combating  it  that 
promises  much. 

Your  sister  [in-law]  has  just  written,  and  from 
her  tone  I  gather  that  she  found  the  total  impres 
sion  of  the  book  rather  gloomy  and  pessimistic. 
I  'm  afraid  I  have  n't  made  clear  enough  the  posi 
tive  part  —  the  love  of  life  and  belief  in  its  issues 
—  which  I  meant  to  be  the  core  of  the  matter. 
How  do  you  feel  about  it? 

Always  yours, 

WILL. 
To  Mrs.  C.  H.  Toy 

CENTURY  CLUB,  NEW  YORK. 

DECEMBER  12,  1900. 
DEAR  MRS.  TOY: 

Your  objection  to  the  "theology"  of  the 
Masque  would  be  well  taken  if  there  were  any 
theology  in  it.  There  is  n't  an  ounce,  or  at  least 
if  there  is  it  is  there  against  my  will.  Of  course  I 
didn't  intend  my  "strangely  unpleasant"  God 
to  be  taken  seriously.  To  me  the  whole  meaning 
and  value  of  the  poem  lies  in  the  humanistic  atti 
tude  and  character  of  Raphael,  the  philosophic 
outlook  of  Uriel,  and  the  plea  for  passion  as  a 
means  of  salvation  everywhere  latent.  The  rest 

133 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

of  it  is  only  mythological  machinery  for  symboliz 
ing  the  opposed  doctrine  —  that  of  the  denial  of 
life.  As  Christianity  (contrary  of  course  to  the 
wish  and  meaning  of  its  founder)  has  historically 
linked  itself  with  this  doctrine,  I  included  certain 
aspects  of  it  in  this  mythological  apparatus  — 
always  with  a  semi-satirical  intention.  I  meant  to 
write  a  poem,  pure  and  simple;  and  my  western 
friends,  with  the  naivete  proper  to  them,  seem  to 
have  accepted  it  as  such;  but  Cambridge  insists 
on  treating  it  as  a  theological  treatise.  As  such, 
they  can  but  find  it  pretty  foolish,  I  fear.  .  .  . 

From  the  time  of  Moody's  return  to  Chicago  at  the 
beginning  of  1901  his  letters,  much  less  frequent  and 
voluminous  than  formerly,  leave  many  gaps  in  the 
record  of  his  life.  He  was  now  able  to  get  longer  leaves 
of  absence  from  his  teaching,  and  spent  much  time  in 
travelling,  both  in  America  and  in  Europe.  His  love 
of  wild  life  led  him  to  the  Rocky  Mountains  with 
Mr.  Hamlin  Garland  in  the  summer  of  1901,  and  to 
Arizona,  alone,  in  the  spring  of  1904  —  excursions 
which  later  bore  fruit  in  his  first  published  prose  play, 
"The  Great  Divide."  He  made  a  trip  to  Greece  in 
1902.  The  rest  of  this  period  he  divided  between 
Boston,  New  York,  and  Chicago.  The  chief  literarjf 
event  was  the  publication  of  his  second  poetic  drama/ 
"The  Fire-Bringer,"  in  March,  1904. 

134 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

CHICAGO,  Jan.  16,  1901. 
DEAR  DAN: 

Many  thanks  for  the  post-card  containing 
extract  from  Robinson's  letter.  Such  words  from 
him  cannot  but  give  me  immense  satisfaction, 
both  because  he  is  a  man  who  weighs  his  words 
and  because  they  apply  in  this  case  to  a  kind  of 
writing  with  which  he  has  n't  much  patience  in 
general  (I  mean  the  "history  of  the  world"  kind 
of  thing)  so  that  I  don't  feel  compelled  in  honesty 
to  discount  for  personal  bias.  Well,  he  can  afford 
to  be  generous. 

It  has  been  the  very  devil  to  get  down  to  work 
again,  after  my  long  and  keenly  relished  holiday. 
Chicago  seemed  uglier  and  grimmer  than  I  had 
believed  possible.  There  was  nothing  to  do  but 
shut  my  eyes,  put  my  sensibilities  in  the  lower 
bureau  drawer,  and  sail  in.  Gradually  the  benefi 
cent  numbness  of  drudgery  is  stealing  over  me, 
and  that  unilluminated  dogged  patience  which 
constitutes  my  substitute  for  moral  courage  is 
beginning  to  possess  what  in  other  seasons  I  am 
wont  to  refer  to  exuberantly  as  my  soul.  It  is  at 
such  times  as  this  that  I  envy  you  most  keenly 

135 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

your  unflinching  hold  upon  spiritual  truth,  and 
your  power  of  walking  in  the  light  of  it.  The  best 
I  can  do  is  to  hump  my  back,  turn  down  my  hat 
brim,  and  stoically  count  the  number  of  streams 
running  down  my  back,  until  the  damned  drizzle 
decides  to  cease.  .  .  . 

Write  when  you  feel  like  it,  and  don't  till  you 
do.  I  mean  do  when  you  do  rather  than  don't. 
That  is  to  say  do  do  and  don't  don't.  See? 

WILL. 

To  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson 

THE  QUADRANGLE  CLUB. 

CHICAGO,  Jan.  24,  1901. 
DEAR  ROBINSON: 

You  will  not  have  thought  it  was  indifference 
to  your  ''poor  words  of  congratulation"  about 
the  Masque  which  has  kept  me  from  answering 
sooner.  What  you  said  gave  me  the  deepest  — 
joy,  I  was  going  to  say;  but  remembering  your 
distrust  of  exuberant  language,  I  will  say  satis 
faction.  Still,  it  was  joy,  all  the  same  —  the  feel 
ing  was  exuberant  enough  to  warrant,  this  once, 
my  florid  vocabulary.  Your  words  were  the  more 
grateful  because  they  came  as  a  surprise.  I 
thought  in  New  York  that  you  were  bravely  try- 

136 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

ing  to  be  generous  (you  would  have  said  "just") 
toward  a  thing  you  rootedly  deplored  but  sus 
pected  yourself  of  being  by  nature  prejudiced 
against.  As  you  had  more  than  done  your  duty 
on  this  hypothesis,  I  could  not  but  consider  this 
later  testimony  as  being  the  voice  of  the  natural 
man,  speaking  the  faith  that  was  in  him ;  and  there 
fore  I  rejoiced. 

Chicago  is  several  kinds  of  hell,  but  I  won't 
weary  you  with  asseverations  that  I  am  being 
shamefully  victimized  by  fate;  you  won't  believe 
it,  and  besides  it 's  a  lie.  I  am  merely  paying  the 
market  rates  for  my  bread  and  beer,  commodities 
for  which  many  a  better  man  has  been  villain 
ously  overcharged.  Some  of  the  vacation  memo 
ries  I  most  like  to  hark  back  to  and  mouse  dream 
ily  over  are  those  walks  we  had  from  Riverdale 
to  Yonkers,  especially  the  last  one.  This  is  n't  a 
letter,  but  it  would  be  a  pleasant  fiction  and  a 
graceful  act  for  you  to  consider  it  so,  and  write  me 
one. 

Always  yours, 

W.  V.  M. 


137 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Mrs.  C.  H.  Toy 

CHICAGO, 
March  2,  1901. 
DEAR  MRS.  TOY: 

.  .  .  Life  here  is  as  ever.  More  different  kinds 
of  a  mistake  and  an  affliction  than  you  can  dream 
—  you  there  in  that  gentle  elegiac  Cambridge. 
Not  that  I  would  give  up  my  journey  through  the 
realms  of  woe ;  I  am  learning  a  lot  down  here,  and 
each  descending  circle  of  the  lamentable  pit  makes 
me  surer  that  I  did  well  to  come.  But  ah,  I  long 
for  a  Virgil  to  comment  and  illuminate  the  thing 
now  and  then !  Even  Dante  had  to  be  personally 
conducted  through  hell,  and  I  guess  he  was  right 
smart  more  of  a  hero  than  what  I  be.  It 's  melting 
outside  today,  and  the  sun  is  doing  a  S^uth 
Halstead  street  bunco  game  on  a  confidin^world. 
Here  is  a  poem  inspired  by  my  last  attempt  to 
wade  the  street: 

Gutters  sing. 
Is  it  spring? 
Does  old  Winter 
Now  beginter 
Quit? 
Nit! 
138 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

Long  time  yet, 
You  bet, 

Ere  G.  S.1 
Comes  to  bless 

Us.   I  guess 
Yes. 

These  " Thoughts  on  a  Thaw"  I  think  of  sub 
mitting  as  my  contribution  to  the  next  edition  of 
The  Poets  of  Indiana:  an  Anthology;  just  published 
by  Macmillan.  At  present  I'm  not  represented, 
but  I  '11  force  them  to  recognize  me  yet. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

WAGON  WHEEL  GAP. 
COLORADO,  Aug.  30,  1901. 
DEAR  DAN: 

If  to  do  were  as  easy  as  to  know  what  't  were 

good  to  do,  I  should  not  have  thus  neglected  the 

best  of  friends  and  good  fellows.  Your  two  letters 

and  the  picture  reached  me  —  I  am  ashamed  to 

think  how  many  months  ago,  and  I  was  too  low  in 

my  mind  even  to  send  a  word  of  goodbye  on  your 

departure  for  Paris.  I  waved  a  loving,  if  dispirited, 

farewell  from  the  central  core  of  Chicago's  smoke 

1  Gentle  Spring. 

139 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

cloud,  and  in  that  infernal  seat  of  contemplation 
have  often  mused  upon  your  goings  and  comings 
in  the  Latin  Quarter.  Tai  pauvre.  Nous  partons 
aujourd'hui.  By  pronouncing  these  mysterious 
formulae  I  have  many  times  evoked  you  in  con 
frontation  with  that  so  elusive  world  of  will  and 
idea  which  we  once  endeavored  to  comprehend 
together  and  found  and  shall  find  entirely  incom 
prehensible.  .  .  . 

At  present,  as  the  superscription  of  this  scrawl 
will  show  you,  I  am  in  the  wilds  of  the  Rockies, 
where  I  have  been  camping  and  trailing  with 
Hamlin  Garland,  in  some  of  the  savages t  old 
country  these  States  afford.  Garland  had  the  bad 
luck  to  get  his  foot  crushed  (his  horse  fell  on  it  in 
scrambling  out  of  a  bog  up  a  steep  bank)  and  he  is 
laid  up  for  a  week  or  two.  Meantime  I  am  doing 
some  of  the  mountain  passes  on  horseback,  riding 
from  thirty  to  fifty  miles  a  day,  trying  to  get  the 
stale  taste  of  a  year's  academica  out  of  my  mouth. 

I  am  free  now  for  a  year.  I  shall  stay  west 
(somewhere  near  Chicago)  until  I  get  that 
wretched  text-book  done  (this  time  it  has  got  to 
be  done!).  .  .  .  This  scrawl  is  all  I  am  up  to  just 
now,  after  a  hard  day's  ride  and  last  night  spent 
sleeplessly  in  a  deserted  mountain  hut  with  three 

140 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

or  four  other  benighted  travellers.  Travellers  is 
euphemistic:  with  the  doubtful  exception  of 
myself  they  were  tramps  —  miners  out  of  a  job 
hoboing  it  to  a  new  mining  camp.  And  down 
right  good  fellows  they  were,  too,  barring  the 
absence  of  certain  niceties  of  person  —  which, 
indeed,  our  somewhat  casual  quarters  were  not 
calculated  to  encourage.  If  by  good  luck  this 
finds  you  at  Chocorua,  greet  for  me  the  Grand 
Old  Man  and  his  pals  the  mountains.  Cull  for  me 
a  morning  phrase,  big  as  Whiteface  and  dewy  as 
those  morning  glories  on  the  projected  and  now  I 
trust  realized  pergola.  I  grow  disproportioned. 
But  cull  it  for  me  natheless  (as  the  Bard  would 
say)  and  send  it  to  me  along  with  an  account  of 
yourself  in  all  the  moods  and  tenses. 

Always  yours, 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Mary  L.  Mason 

i  WILLOW  ST. 
[Boston.]   Dec.  27  [1901]. 
MY  DEAR  MRS.  MASON: 

It  was  immensely  kind  of  you  to  remember  me 
on  Christmas  day.  I  have  been  munching  the 
ginger  as  I  work,  and  eagerly  watching  for  some 

141 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

effect  on  my  style.  Did  you  send  it  in  that  hope? 
If  so,  I  trust  that  means  you  are  sufficiently  inter 
ested  in  the  fate  of  the  text-book  to  be  willing  to 
do  some  more  typewriting  for  it.  ...  Will  you 

let  me  know  whether  to  send  you  more  MS.,  and 
also  will  you  send  me  a  memorandum  of  what  we 
owe  you  for  the  two  chapters  on  the  novel? 
•         •         •         •         •         •         •         •         • 

Yours, 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

i  WILLOW  ST. 

Jan.  5,  1902. 
DEAR  J.  P.  P., 

I  am  not  going  to  apologize  for  not  telling  you 
so  sooner,  but  am  going  to  tell  you  at  once  and 
to  your  face  that  I  think  the  Play  ["  Marlowe  "J 
is  a  beauty.  For  honest  beauty  and  wisdom  and 
strength  it  beats  Stephen  Phillips  and  the  rest  of 
them  out  of  the  world.  Your  blank  verse  has 
strengthened  incalculably  since  Fortune  and  M.  E. 
It  has  just  the  clearness,  grip,  and  nervousness  I 
have  been  looking  for  it  to  attain.  The  ventrilo 
quism  of  your  dialogue  impresses  me  more  at  each 
reading  —  a  great  and  hard  thing  to  achieve  in 

142 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

blank  verse.  I  can  count  on  one  hand  the  drama 
tists  who  have  learned  that  trick  of  mirroring 
character  —  mental  status  —  etc.,  in  the  move 
ment  of  a  blank  verse  line.  Your  Marlowe  is  a 
woman's  Marlowe,  but  all  the  better  for  that. 
He  is  what  he  ought  to  have  been  and  perhaps 
essentially  was,  underneath,  though  I  doubt  if  he 
found  it  out  —  probably  went  to  the  dogs  for  not 
finding  it  out.  Your  Alison  is  a  man's  Alison,  and 
all  the  better  for  that !  (Only  a  man  would  never 
call  her  "the  Little  Quietude,"  and  I  wish  you 
had  n't.  I  know  I  'm  a  brute  for  not  liking  that 
and  the  "shrine"  business,  but  I  don't.)  But  all 
the  figures  are  greatly  energized  —  snap  fire  when 
you  touch  them  —  and  Marlowe  is  full  of  those 
brave  translunary  things  that  the  first  poets  had. 
By  all  the  Muses,  we  shall  have  an  American 
drama  yet,  and  it  will  date  from  Marlowe:  a 
Play. 

I  have  been  living  in  a  night-mare  since  I  got 
here,  and  have  seen  no  one.  The  strain  is  nearly 
over,  and  I  am  beginning  to  remember  once  more 
that  this  world  is  after  all  a  real  world,  full  of  such 
good  things  as  friends  and  friendly  talk.  I  am 
coming  out  to  see  you  in  a  day  or  two,  and  you 
must  n't  shut  the  door  on  me  because  my  manners 

143 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

are  bad.    My  heart  is  a  good  heart,  and  wears 
Kentish  russet  — 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Mary  L.  Mason 

i  WILLOW  ST. 
BOSTON,  Jan.  27,  1902. 
MY  DEAR  MRS.  MASON: 

Your  word  of  praise  for  the  poor  text-book  was 
most  cheering;  I  shall  hope  and  trust,  after  this, 
that  it  is  n't  as  bad  as  it  seems  to  me.  It  lies  on 
my  spirit  like  Incubus. 

.  .  .  Your  feminine  mathematics  juggled  you 
out  of  about  fifteen  hundred  words  on  your  last 
count.  Thank  God  that  you  are  dealing  with  a 
just  man,  and  forswear  addition:  it  is  a  vain 
thing  for  safety. 

Always  yours, 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

MACKINAC  ISLAND,  MICH. 

Oct.  22,  1903. 
DEAR  DAN: 

Rumor  vaguely  reports  you  as  domiciled  at  the 
Benedick,  and  my  hopes  that  you  are  so  are  too 
strong  to  allow  me  to  doubt.  I  have  spent  the 

144 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

summer  on  this  little  island  in  Lake  Huron,  fin 
ishing  the  poem  of  which  I  read  you  the  beginning 
(you  may  remember)  last  winter.1  I  have  often 
thought  of  you  and  wondered  where  you  were. 
Now  that  winter  and  return  to  city  life  is  at  hand, 
and  the  possibility  of  my  spending  said  \vinter  in 
New  York  is  good,  my  eagerness  to  hear  from  you, 
and  if  the  good  fates  will  permit  me,  to  get  quar 
ters  within  hearing  distance  of  your  voice  and 
your  piano,  reaches  the  point  of  epistolary  explo 
sion  —  as  you  know,  a  high  point  with  me,  .  .  . 

To  Josephine  Preston  Peabody 

CHICAGO,  March  22  [1904]. 
DEAR  J.  P.  P.: 

I  was  sorry  not  to  see  you  again,  especially  if 
you  were  primed  with  talk  about  It;  for  I,  as 
always,  am  wearying  to  know  about  It,  but  seem 
daily  farther  from  achieving  knowledge.  The 
more  I  have  to  do  with  It,  the  more  It  escapes 
my  thought  and  definition.  I  don't  mean  to  imply 
that  you  were  going  to  think  or  define,  but  I 
suspect  that  you  were  going  to  throw  out  memo 
rable  speech,  while  revolving  invisible  with  illu 
mination  upon  your  stellar  axis. 

1  Probably  "The  Fire-Bringer." 
145 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

I  am  hesitating  whether  or  not  to  go  to  the 
Great  Desert  of  Arizona  and  live  with  the  Indians 
and  "lung-ers"  this  spring.  Probably  I  shall  go. 
If  I  never  come  back,  but  stay  and  choose  some 
savage  woman  to  rear  my  dusky  race,  remember 
that  I  intended  a  copy  of  the  Fire-Eater  [sic]  for 
you,  with  a  handsome  inscription.  Yours, 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson 

HOTEL  BALTIMORE. 
KANSAS  CITY,  Mo.,  March  29,  1904. 

DEAR  ROBINSON: 

Behold  me  en  route  for  Arizona,  the  Painted 
Desert,  and  aboriginal  life.  .  .  . 

The  Fire-Eater  [The  Fire-Bringer]  reached  me 
just  a  minute  before  I  left  Chicago,  and  I  had 
time  only  to  scratch  your  initials  on  the  fly-leaf 
of  a  copy,  and  forgot  to  leave  your  address  behind ; 
nevertheless,  the  little  book  (of  which  I  suspect 
you  heartily  disapprove,  for  reasons)  will  reach 
you  in  due  course. 

Always  yours, 

W.  V.  M. 


146 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

KANSAS  CITY,  Mo. 

March  29,  1904. 
DEAR  DAN: 

I  am  a  thousand  times  obliged  for  your  friendly 
offices  in  negotiating  the  lease  and  sending  on  my 
stuff.  After  I  wrote  I  became  conscience-stricken 
over  the  magnitude  of  the  trouble  I  had  put  you 
to ;  but  the  chance  I  had  for  going  to  Arizona  and 
seeing  some  aboriginal  life  was  exceptional,  and  I 
could  not  afford  to  go  on  to  New  York  to  make  the 
arrangements  myself ;  at  least  to  do  so  would  have 
so  seriously  depleted  my  funds  that  I  should  prob 
ably  have  had  to  abandon  the  western  trip  after 
said  arrangements  had  been  made.  I  do  not  see 
what  you  get  out  of  it  except  the  good  man's 
ancient  reward  (too  much  relied  upon  by  putters 
of  others  to  trouble)  and  the  satisfaction  of  having 

near  at  hand  and  in  pleasant  quarters.  I  have 

written  urging  him  to  occupy  the  room,  and  told 
him  to  apply  to  you  for  the  key  to  the  bureau.  .  .  . 
My  book1  turned  up  (advanced  copies)  just  as  I 
was  leaving  the  house  to  take  the  western  train; 
I  had  time  to  put  your  initials  on  a  fly-leaf,  and 

i  "TheFire-Bringer." 
147 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

M.  L.  M's  on  another,  and  they  ought  to  reach 
you  in  a  day  or  two.  I  shall  drop  you  a  line  now 
and  then  from  the  shadow  of  a  giant- cactus  or 
from  the  top  of  a  Zuni  pueblo. 

Ever  yours, 

W.  V.  M. 

P.S.  No,  Chicago  has  not  been  chucked,  merely 
happily  relegated  to  the  future. 

To  Percy  MacKaye 

2970  GROVELAND  AVE., 

CHICAGO,  Aug.  5,  1904. 
MY  DEAR  MR.  MACKAYE, 

Let  me  thank  you  very  heartily  for  your 
generous  words  concerning  "The  Fire-Bringer." 
Such  words  would  be  very  pleasant  to  hear  from 
any  one,  and  they  are  trebly  so  when  that  one  is  a 
fellow- workman  in  the  poetic  drama.  It  is  true, 
as  Mr.  Shipman  has  told  you,  that  I  am  heart 
and  soul  dedicated  to  the  conviction  that  modern 
life  can  be  presented  on  the  stage  in  the  poetic 
mediums,  and  adequately  presented  only  in  that 
way.  If  I  am  anywhere  near  Cornish  this  summer, 
as  is  not  improbable,  it  will  give  me  genuine 
pleasure  to  look  you  up.  In  any  case  you  will  find 
me  from  the  first  of  November  on,  at  51  West  loth 

148 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

Street,  New  York;  and  I  hope  that  you  will  come 
to  see  me  there.  With  thanks  and  good  wishes, 
I  am  Earnestly  yours 

WM.  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

PERCY  MACKAYE  ESQ. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

51  WEST  loth  St. 
NEW  YORK,  Oct.  8,  1904. 
DEAR  DAN: 

I  got  your  quotation  about  St.  L6  and  the  Val 
de  Vire,  and  was  delighted  with  it,  as  I  should 
have  assured  you  if  you  had  given  me  an  address. 
By  the  way,  I  have  put  "Old  Pourquoi"  (do  you 
remember?)  into  a  poem,  which  I  think  will 
amuse  you. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Edmund  Clarence  Stedman 

2970  GROVELAND  AVE. 
CHICAGO,  Jan.  12,  1905. 

MY  DEAR  MR.  STEDMAN: 

Your  letter  has  followed  me  deviously  through 
the  south  and  north  again,  with  its  most  friendly 

149 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

message.  That  you  should  have  taken  the  trouble 
to  write  me  at  such  length  and  with  your  own 
hand  gives  double  worth  to  the  news  of  my  nomi 
nation  for  membership  in  the  Institute.  As  for 
this  latter  let  me  say  at  once  that  I  am  grateful 
to  you  for  proposing  my  name,  and  if  elected  shall 
accept  the  honor  gladly.  Your  generous  words 
concerning  my  "  Fire-Bringer  "  have  given  me 
great  joy.  The  poem  got  little  praise,  and  that 
little  mostly  misdirected,  so  that  I  had  come  to 
think  of  it,  as  —  so  far  as  my  hoped-for  audience 
was  concerned  —  a  failure.  But  if  you  like  it,  it  is 
no  failure,  and  I  can  go  on  with  a  good  heart.  It  is 
a  vast  pity  you  did  not  carry  out  your  intention 
of  treating  the  theme  yourself.  It  takes  some  gen 
erosity  to  feel  so,  since  your  poem  would  have 
rendered  mine  superfluous,  if  not  impertinence. 
But  I  am  at  bottom  more  jealous  for  Poetry,  and 
especially  for  the  poetry  which  shall  be  named  and 
recognized  as  in  a  large  sense  American,  than  I  am 
for  my  own  poems,  though  jealous  enough  for 
them,  Heaven  knows,  according  to  the  flesh!  Your 
beautiful  Alectrydn,  taken  in  connection  with 
what  you  tell  me  of  your  thwarted  intention, 
shows  how  parlously  near  I  came  to  having  my 
theme  "assumed"  into  a  heaven  of  invention 

150 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

where  I  should  neither  have  dared  nor  wished  to 
pursue  it.  You  have  my  —  so  to  speak  —  "post 
humorous  "  gratitude,  with  the  reservation  named. 
I  am  particularly  glad  that  you  do  not  share  the 
current  prejudice  against  such  subjects,  in  favor 
of  a  literary  Americanism  which  I,  for  my  own 
part,  cannot  but  deem  false  in  theory  and  barren 
in  practice.  .  .  .  Believe  me,  Faithfully  yours, 
WILLIAM  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

The  studio  at  51  West  loth  St.,  occupied  by  a  friend 
during  the  Arizona  trip,  made  a  convenient  New  York 
headquarters,  which  Moody  retained  for  some  time. 
He  was  back  there  in  the  fall  of  1904,  and  through  the 
following  spring.  His  work  was  now  eagerly  sought 
by  some  of  the  magazines,  and  one  of  the  pleasantest 
friendships  of  this  time  was  that  with  Richard  Watson 
Gilder  of  the  Century.  Mr.  Gilder's  poem,  referred  to 
in  the  letters,  was  printed  in  the  Atlantic  Monthly  for 
June,  1905,  under  the  title,  "A  New  Poet." 

A   NEW   POET 

BY    R.    W.    GILDER 

I 

FRIENDS,  beware! 

Stop  babbling!  Hark,  a  sound  is  in  the  air! 

Above  the  pretty  songs  of  schools 

(Not  of  music  made,  but  rules), 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

Above  the  panic  rush  for  gold 

And  emptinesses  manifold, 

And  selling  of  the  soul  for  phantom  fame, 

And  reek  of  praises  where  there  should  be  blame ; 

Over  the  dust  and  muck, 

The  buzz  and  roar  of  wheels, 

Another  music  steals,  — 

A  right,  true  note  is  struck. 

II 

Friends,  beware! 

A  sound  of  singing  in  the  air! 

The  love  song  of  a  man  who  loves  his  fellow  men ; 

Mother-love  and  country-love,  and  the  love  of  sea 

and  fen; 
Lovely  thoughts  and  mighty4  thoughts  and  thoughts 

that  linger  long; 
There  has  come  to  the  old  world's  singing  the  thrill 

of  a  brave  new  song. 

ill 

They  said  there  were  no  more  singers, 
But  listen!  —  A  master  voice! 
A  voice  of  the  true  joy-bringers! 
Now  will  ye  heed  and  rejoice, 
Or  pass  on  the  other  side, 
And  wait  till  the  singer  hath  died, 
Then  weep  o'er  his  voiceless  clay? 
Friends,  beware! 

152 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

A  keen,  new  sound  is  in  the  air,  — 
Know  ye  a  poet's  coming  is  the  old  world's  judg 
ment  day! 

To  Richard  Watson  Gilder 

51  WEST  IOTH  ST. 
NEW  YORK,  April  17  [1905]. 
DEAR  MR.  GILDER, 

At  the  risk  of  seeming  ungracious,  and  insensi 
ble  of  the  honor  which  you  have  planned  to  do 
me,  I  am  going  to  ask  you  to  publish  the  poem  in 
the  Atlantic  without  my  initials.  I  do  so  because 
of  no  boyish  mock-modesty,  but  because  I  know 
in  the  bottom  of  my  heart  that  I  have  not  yet 
reached  a  point  in  the  practice  of  our  divine  art 
which  entitles  me  to  this  sort  of  public  recogni 
tion  from  a  man  like  you.  Even  if  you  are  ardently 
and  generously  minded  enough  to  think  other 
wise,  I  beg  that  you  will  yield  to  my  own  deep 
feeling  in  the  matter,  which  I  express  only  after 
long  thought.  Try  to  ascribe  my  rejection  of  the 
offered  honor  to  a  sentiment  no  less  magnanimous 
than  was  the  one  which  prompted  you  to  extend 
it,  and  believe  me 

Always  faithfully  yours, 

WM.  VAUGHN  MOODY. 
153 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

To  Richard  Watson  Gilder 

51  WEST  IOTH  ST. 
NEW  YORK,  April  iQth. 
DEAR  MR.  GILDER, 

I  am  grateful  to  you  for  acceding  to  my  request 
about  the  initials,  and  for  understanding  my 
motive.  I  am  also  much  obliged  to  you  for  the 
sight  of  your  letter  to  Traubel  about  the  Whit 
man  letters.  Whitman  did  himself  sore  wrong 
in  many  of  his  judgments  —  but  for  the  matter  of 
that  so  do  we  all.  It  is  good  to  rise  above  personal 
injustice  as  you  do  in  your  lines  written  for  the 
dinner,  which  I  return  (together  with  the  letter) 
with  thanks  for  the  privilege  of  seeing  them. 


To  Richard  Watson  Gilder 

51  WEST  IOTH  ST. 
NEW  YORK,  Thursday. 
DEAR  MR.  GILDER, 

The  poem  made  me  very  proud  and  happy, 
and  I  shall  preserve  it  among  my  most  cherished 
possessions,  both  for  its  generous  personal  praise 
and  for  its  intrinsic  beauty.  I  have  made  the 
correction  of  which  you  speak. 


154 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

To  Richard  Watson  Gilder 

[Posted  April  27,  1905.] 
DEAR  MR.  GILDER: 

I  scribble  this  lying  on  my  back  in  the  hospital, 
where  on  Friday  last  I  undenvent  an  operation 
which  proved  rather  serious.  I  did  not  tell  you 
about  it  and  do  not  send  you  the  address  now 
because  I  know  that  your  native  kindness  would 
lead  you  to  take  all  sorts  of  trouble  about  it,  and 
my  own  instinct  is  just  to  lie  low  and  not  peep 
until  nature  restores  me  again  to  an  upright 
posture  and  the  self-respect  thereunto  appertain 
ing.  I  am  well  looked  after,  and  getting  along 
capitally  under  the  circumstances.  I  started  this 
note  to  thank  you  for  letting  me  see  Robinson's 
note,  and  to  say  that  I  would  send  you  a  poem  or 
two  for  inspection  when  I  get  up  again. 

I  know  you  must  be  terribly  cut  up  over 
Jefferson's  death.  Yours, 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Edwin  Arlington  Robinson 

33  EAST  33RD  ST., 
NEW  YORK,  May  10  [1905]. 
DEAR  ROBINSON, 

Your  note  of  inquiry  and  expostulation  reached 
155 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

me  some  days  ago,  but  I  have  hardly  been  up  to 
writing  before  today.  I  am  happy  to  report  that 
the  operation  which  I  underwent  three  weeks  ago 
has  succeeded  admirably,  and  I  shall  soon  be  on 
my  feet  again  —  at  least  on  one  of  them  and  a 
cane  or  two.  For  the  first  few  days  after  they 
sliced  me  I  had  a  squeak  for  it ;  temperature  any 
thing  in  the  shade  and  pulse  hopping  like  a  jack- 
rabbit  who  descries  Teddy  on  the  horizon.  How 
ever,  Nature  soon  decided  that  I  was  of  more 
use  to  her  in  an  organized  state  than  as  phos 
phates,  and  since  then  I  have  made  a  rapid  recov 
ery.  ... 

To  Richard  Watson  Gilder 

51  WEST  IOTH  ST. 
May  I3th,  1905. 
DEAR  MR.  GILDER, 

Yes,  I  am  out  of  the  hospital,  thank  God,  owing 
to  my  flat  refusal  to  endure  any  longer  the  hideous 
monotony  of  blank  walls  and  blank  hours  (the 
latter  my  own  fault,  I  know),  but  I  am  not  yet 
very  much  master  of  my  machine  —  only  able  to 
hobble  tentatively  about  on  one  leg  and  a  cane  or 
two. 


156 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

I  do  not  want  to  go  away  for  the  summer  with 
out  seeing  you  again,  for  who  knows  where  either 
of  us  will  be  by  the  time  the  leaves  fall?  If  you 
wish,  I  will  bring  a  few  verses  to  read,  but  I  do 
not  think  that  I  have  anything  suitable  for  the 
magazine.  If  I  am  to  do  this  I  must  read  them  to 
you  solus  (this  you  will  grant  to  my  constitutional 
fear  of  an  "audience"). 

Thanks  for  St.  Gaudens*  note.  It  is  pleasant 
to  possess  anything  from  the  hand  of  that  noble 
artist. 

Faithfully  yours, 

WM.  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

Mrs.  Gilder  puts  me  under  another  debt  by  a 
second  jar  of  that  delectable  coagulation. 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Mary  L.  Mason 

51  WEST  IOTH  ST. 
Monday.    [Postmark,  June  5,  1905.] 
DEAR  MARY  MASON, 

Though  I  must  sorrowfully  confess  to  having 
been  "beguiled"  by  no  dames,  yet  so  beguiling  a 
note  as  yours  of  this  morning  is  a  sufficient  recom 
pense.  My  sister  has  watched  over  me  with  so 
hawklike  an  eye,  to  prevent  me  from  over- 

157 


SOME   LETTERS  OF 

exerting  my  lame  leg,  that  I  have  not  been  able 
to  escape  as  far  as  your  house.  This  week  I  shall 
make  another  and  more  desperate  attempt  to  run 
the  blockade,  and  in  case  of  success  shall  drop  in 
upon  you  some  evening  to  swap  operation-stories. 
.  .  .  You  must  not  look  to  find  me  the  picture  of 
grace  —  the  pardlike  spirit  beautiful  and  swift  — 
that  I  once  was.  .  .  . 

W.  V.  M. 

To  Richard  Watson  Gilder 

2970  GROVELAND  AVE., 
CHICAGO,  ILL.,  Aug.  23,  '05. 
DEAR  MR.  GILDER, 

The  account  of  "housework"  in  your  country, 
and  especially  your  contribution  to  the  cere 
monies,  gave  me  the  keenest  pleasure.  I  am  an 
ancient  and  —  as  I  thought  —  irreconcilable 
enemy  of  the  Whitmanic  verse-mode,  but  your 
handling  of  it  goes  far  to  prove  me  wrong  and 
baptize  me  into  the  new  dispensation.  The 
bee-filled  linden- tree,  "  humming  .  .  .  like  the 
plucked  string  of  a  violin,"  is  unforgettably  good. 
As  regards  the  "Second  Coming"  I  would  say  to 
the  possible  illustrator  that  the  caulking-man  was 
a  strong,  sensual-looking  young  Greek  of  the 

158 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

island  type,  naked  to  the  waist,  with  cropped 
hair  and  bare  feet;  the  person  speaking  to  him 
was  curiously  spiritual  in  feature,  slightly  bearded, 
bare-headed,  dressed  in  the  long  flowing  gown  of 
the  Greek  priesthood,  rusty  black  in  tone.  He 
looked  like  an  Armenian.  I  will  try  to  clarify  the 
"watery  death"  stanza,  either  by  distillation  or 
plain  sopping  up. 

The  President's  Outlook  article  was  undeniably 
kind  in  intention  and  will  doubtless  do  Robinson 
much  worldly  good.  As  for  its  substance,  since 
we  have  adopted  the  absolute  despotic  form  of 
government  I  deem  it  best  that  such  treasonable 
matter  as  criticism  of  the  imperial  utterances, 
even  on  such  a  trifling  subject  as  poetry,  be  not 
committed  to  ink.  I  have  no  taste  for  labor  in  the 
mines  of  Siberia  —  I  mean  Alaska  —  with  a  ball 
and  chain  on  my  left  leg. 

Various  circumstances  make  it  difficult  for  me 
to  go  East  as  I  had  intended,  but  I  may  go  on 
later.  If  so  I  shall  surely  give  myself  the  pleasure 
of  seeing  you  at  Four  Brooks.  Sincerely  yours, 

WM.  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

"The  President's  Outlook  article"  was  a  very  com 
plimentary  review  by  Colonel  Roosevelt  of  Mr.  Edwin 
Arlington  Robinson's  "Captain  Craig." 

159 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

Early  in  1906  Moody  finished  his  prose  play,  "The 
Great  Divide,"  which  received  some  trial  performances 
that  spring  in  Chicago  under  the  title  "A  Sabine 
Woman,"  and  was  regularly  put  on  the  stage  the  fol 
lowing  fall,  in  New  York,  by  Miss  Margaret  Anglin 
and  Mr.  Henry  Miller.  The  opening  night  was 
October  4th. 

To  Richard  Watson  Gilder 

51  WEST  IOTH  ST. 
NEW  YORK,  Feb.  5  [1906]. 
DEAR  MR.  GILDER, 

I  do  not  know  what  the  scope  or  function  of  the 
MacDowell  Club  is,  so  that  I  cannot  tell  whether 
my  new  play  ["The  Great  Divide"]  would  be 
suitable  for  its  stage  or  not.  I  am  anxious  to  get 
it  produced  on  the  professional  stage,  by  a  pro 
fessional  troupe.  Miss  Marlowe  and  So  them, 
however,  I  am  sure  would  not  cotton  to  it,  as  it  is 
"  realism "  of  a  rather  grim  and  uncompromising 
type,  without  the  romantic  glamor  which  they 
affect  —  at  least  what  romantic  glamor  there  is 
is  implicit  and  present  only  to  the  probing  eye  of 
the  elect.  I  should  very  much  like  to  get  Henry 
Miller  to  take  it,  but  I  guess  that  is  out  of  the 
question.  The  "Fire-Bringer"  —  if  all  plans  go 
through  —  is  to  be  produced  next  winter  in 

1 60 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

Chicago,  in  a  new  theatre  which  is  being  started 
there. 


To  Percy  MacKaye 

HOTEL  SEVILLE,  NEW  YORK  CITY, 

Oct.  n,  1906. 
DEAR  PERCY, 

Thanks  for  your  cordial  note  about  the  play. 
Broadway  the  formidable  has  indeed  roared  us  as 
any  sucking  dove,  for  this  once.  It's  like  taking 
candy  from  a  child.  I  am  making  my  plans  to  get 
down  to  Philadelphia  for  your  opening.  Save  me 
a  ticket,  and  I  shall  come  if  it 's  a  possible  thing. 

Faithfully  yours, 

WILL. 

To  Daniel  Gregory  Mason 

[NEW  YORK.] 

Oct.  12,  1906. 
DEAR  DAN, 

I  had  tickets  in  my  pocket  for  you  and  Mary, 
for  the  opening  night  of  the  play,  and  hoped  you 
would  turn  up  to  use  them.  When  you  did  n't 
I  consoled  myself  with  the  reflection  that,  in  case 
the  thing  was  a  failure,  you  would  be  spared  pain, 
and  I  also,  by  your  absence.  When,  at  the  end  of 

161 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

the  first  act,  it  looked  like  a  go,  and  still  more 
when,  after  the  second,  the  audience  rose  like  a 
sea  in  a  storm  and  thundered  its  approval,  my 
regrets  returned  manifold.  Let  me  know  when  you 
are  coming  in,  that  I  may  secure  tickets  for  you : 
the  house  is  selling  out  now  several  days  ahead, 
and  we  are  turning  hundreds  of  people  away 
every  night.  Hooray! 

I  want  very  much  to  come  out  to  Washington1 
for  a  day  or  two  next  week.  ...  Be  prepared  to 
show  me  some  nice  hill-farms,  which  can  be 
bought  for  a  little  money.  I  am  looking  for  one. 

Yours, 

W.  V.  M. 

In  the  spring  of  1908,  while  living  in  rooms  he  had 
taken  at  107  Waverly  Place,  New  York,  Moody  was 
prostrated  by  a  severe  and  prolonged  attack  of  typhoid 
fever,  from  which  his  health  never  completely  recov 
ered.  His  hitherto  stalwart  constitution  seemed  broken 
and  all  work  was  hampered  by  a  languor  peculiarly 
hard  for  his  active  nature  to  endure.  He  was  devotedly 
nursed  by  his  friend  of  many  years  standing,  Mrs. 
Harriet  Brainerd,  of  Chicago,  whom  he  married  in 
1909.  The  chief  literary  work  of  this  time  of  broken 
health  was  the  revision  of  "The  Faith-Healer"  for 
performance  in  January,  1910,  and  the  drafting  of  the 
1  Washington,  Connecticut. 
162 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

first  act  of  "The  Death  of  Eve,"  intended  to  complete 
the  trilogy  of  poetic  dramas,  but  never  finished.  He 
died  October  17,  1910,  at  Colorado  Springs. 

To  Henry  Miller 

HOTEL  PONTCHARTRAIN. 

DETROIT,  Jan.  23rd,  1909. 
MY  DEAR  MR.  MILLER, 

I  saw  the  performance  ["The  Great  Divide"] 
this  afternoon  for  the  first  time  in  many  months, 
and  I  am  forced  to  protest  against  the  way  in 
which  the  character  of  Philip  has  been  gradually, 
but  at  last  in  the  end  totally,  changed,  both  in 
spirit  and  significance.  It  is  now  played  as  a 
comedy  part,  and  the  whole  effort  is  spent  upon 
the  attempt  to  wring  the  words  and  action,  willy- 
nilly,  into  the  guise  of  comic  relief.  I  need  hardly 
point  out  to  you  that  this  is  to  deprive  the  play 
of  an  essential  element  and  to  very  seriously 
damage  it  thereby. 

I  make  this  statement  with  extreme  unwilling 
ness,  but  I  feel  that  I  must  do  so  both  in  fairness 
to  myself  and  in  the  interest  of  the  play's  future 
integrity. 

Believe  me,  Very  sincerely  yours, 

WM.  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

163 


SOME   LETTERS  OF 


To  Henry  Miller 

2970  GROVELAND  AVE. 

CHICAGO,  Jan.  29,  '09. 
DEAR  MR.  MILLER, 

I  have  not  written  before  about  the  proposed 
change  in  the  first  act  of  the  Great  Divide,  first 
because  I  have  been  again  in  bad  health,  but 
chiefly  because  I  wanted  to  think  it  over  from 
every  point  of  view  and  see  if  it  would  "hold 
water"  everywhere.  I  am  now  convinced,  for  my 
own  part,  that  it  is  all  right.  The  change  is  so 
slight  and  obvious  a  one  that  you  will  probably 
be  skeptical  at  first  of  its  efficacy,  and  in  any  case 
you  will  be  surprised  that  it  has  not  hitherto 
occurred  to  us.  It  is,  in  a  word,  simply  to  omit 
from  the  first  act  all  mention  of  marriage.  Ruth 
says  merely  "Save  me,  and  I  will  make  it  up  to 
you"  (of  course  the  dialogue  here  will  have  to  be 
somewhat  changed,  but  remains  in  substance  the 
same,  with  the  exception  noted).  She  does  not 
read  the  letter  out,  and  its  contents  do  not  emerge 
until  the  second  act.  He  speaks  of  reaching  San 
Jacinto  before  daylight,  but  there  is  no  mention 
of  marriage  there,  although  by  this  time  and  in 
the  dialogue  which  follows  it  becomes  clear  (with- 

164 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

out  any  overt  expression  at  all,  and  without  any 
change)  that  marriage  is  in  his  mind.  He  reads 
(to  himself)  the  note  which  she  leaves  for  her 
brother,  and  it  is  here  that  the  idea  of  marriage 
begins  to  take  firm  shape  in  his  mind,  but  I  do 
not  think  that  the  subject  ought  to  be  discussed 
or  even  broached  between  them.  In  the  second 
act  it  is  made  clear  that  they  were  married  on  the 
very  night  of  the  attack,  at  San  Jacinto,  and  the 
rest  of  the  play  goes  on  without  change.  What  do 
you  think?  I  have  rewritten  the  first  act  on  these 
lines,  have  criticised  the  result  from  every  stand 
point,  and  I  firmly  believe  that  the  vexatious  and 
long-standing  problem  is  solved  at  last. 

I  have  also  made  some  verbal  changes  (chiefly 
omissions)  in  both  the  first  and  second  acts,  the 
reasons  for  which  I  will  explain  at  length  when  I 
see  you.  I  shall  also  tighten  up  the  encounter 
between  Ghent  and  Philip  in  Act  in,  so  as  to 
make  of  it  a  real  menace  on  the  brother's  part. 

I  am  unable  to  send  you  the  revised  manu 
script  at  this  moment,  as  I  was  forced  by  certain 
sudden  complications  in  the  matter  of  printing 
the  book  to  send  on  the  only  copy  I  had  to 
Hough  ton,  Mifflin.  This  will  be  returned  to  me 
soon,  when  I  shall  forward  it  promptly  to  you.  I 

165 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

have  also  been  too  ill  to  get  in  shape  the  detailed 
criticisms  of  the  acting  which  I  jotted  down  in 
Detroit,  but  as  the  company  is  to  be  practically 
re-made  for  England  perhaps  there  is  nothing  to 
be  gained  by  badgering  the  present  actors  with 
minute  criticism.  What  do  you  think? 

My  doctor  threatens,  if  I  don't  do  better,  to 
ship  me  off  to  Southern  California.  I  hope  this 
won't  be  necessary,  or  if  necessary  that  I  can  get 
back  in  due  season  to  watch  the  rehearsals  of  the 
Faith- Healer.  Sincerely  yours, 

W.  V.  MOODY. 

To  Henry  Miller 

2970  GROVELAND  AVE. 

CHICAGO,  Feb.  ist,  '09. 
DEAR  MR.  MILLER, 

I  have  been  doing  very  badly  in  health  of  late 
and  am  under  doctor's  orders  to  go  to  Southern 
California  at  once,  on  pain  of  a  breakdown.  This 
is  very  annoying  to  me,  as  I  fear  it  will  be  also  to 
you,  but  there  is  no  getting  round  it.  I  have  given 
orders  to  Houghton,  Mifflin  &  Co.,  4  Park  St.,  Bos 
ton,  to  forward  to  your  New  York  office  promptly 
the  proof-sheets  of  "The  Great  Divide,"  which 
will  place  before  you  my  mature  ideas  concerning 

1 66 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

the  changes  already  mentioned  to  you.  Of  course 
you  are  under  no  obligation  to  adopt  them,  but  I 
hope  that  before  rejecting  any  of  them  in  favor  of 
the  old  version  you  will  give  each  change  or  omis 
sion  your  serious  consideration.  The  slight  (but  I 
think  important)  changes  in  the  second  act  are  in 
the  direction  of  softening  the  harsh  asperity  of 
Ruth's  tone;  also  in  one  case  (the  omission  of  the 
lines:  " Funny,  ain't  it  —  Well,  I  take  my  punish 
ment"  etc.  "What  are  these  papers?"  "Plans 
for  a  sheep-corral  ")  to  soften  the  harshness  of 
Ghent's  tone,  which  I  think  at  this  point  grates  on 
the  nerves  unduly.  In  the  third  act  the  only  change 
of  any  importance  is  in  the  scene  between  Philip  and 
Ghent,  where  I  have  tried  to  put  some  real  menace 
into  Philip's  attack.  If  the  stage  directions  are 
followed  here,  I  feel  sure  the  scene  —  and  thereby 
the  whole  act  —  will  be  greatly  strengthened. 

Please,  please  persuade  whoever  plays  Ruth  in 
London  to  put  love  into  Act  II.  Miss  Lawton 
plays  it  without  one  hint  of  tenderness  and 
smothered  affection  (or  rather  affection  battling 
with  pride),  and  in  consequence  her  yielding  to 
Ghent  at  the  close  of  the  play  seems  unconvincing 
—  a  mere  theatrical  forced  note  for  the  "happy 
ending,"  instead  of  seeming,  as  it  really  is,  the 

167 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

final  releasing  of  the  flood-gates  of  her  love.  This 
is  really,  as  you  feel  as  strongly  as  I  do,  the 
master-note  of  the  play.  It  has  never  been  truly 
rendered,  and  at  present  it  is  not  even  suggested. 
This  may  sound  like  harsh  criticism,  but  it  is 
nevertheless  gospel  truth. 

One  thing  more.  I  beg  you  to  reconsider  the 
stage  business  at  the  very  close  of  Act  I  (I  mean 
where  Ghent  raises  his  hand  and  points,  and 
Ruth  goes  past  him  cringing  with  bent  head). 
This  seems  to  me  melodramatic  and  false  in  its 
effect  —  it  is  quite  out  of  key  with  Ghent's  simple, 
straightforward,  unmelodramatic  character,  and 
also  with  the  girl's  corresponding  qualities.  Please 
think  of  this.  Also,  I  think  the  expression  of  Ghent's 
sorrow  at  the  close  of  Act  n  is  now  over-done. 

I  think  that  his  bursting  into  violent  and 
audible  grief  alienates  rather  than  wins  the  sym 
pathy  of  the  audience.  You  will  forgive  me  for 
these  frank  criticisms.  You  asked  me  for  them. 

I  am  sorry  to  inflict  so  long  a  letter  upon  you, 
but  as  my  future  is  uncertain  in  the  matter  of 
health  and  whereabouts,  I  felt  impelled  to  set 
these  things  down.  Any  word  you  can  send  me  to 
my  Los  Angeles  address,  will  be  gratefully  received ; 

1 68 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

I  am  anxious  to  keep  in  touch  with  your  plans. 
Sincerely  yours, 

WM.  VAUGHN  MOODY. 

To  Mrs.  C.  H.  Toy 

107  WAVERLY  PLACE, 
NEW  YORK,  Feb.  17  [1909.] 
DEAR  MRS.  TOY, 

.  .  .  The  new  play  ["The  Faith-Healer"],  of 
which  you  say  you  have  heard,  is  a  queerish  thing, 
at  the  antipodes  from  this  one  ["The  Great 
Divide"]  in  method  and  feeling.  .  .  . 

The  thing  I  have  most  at  heart  just  now  is  a 
poetic  —  I  mean  a  verse  —  play.  I  have  got  a 
grand  idea,  and  keep  feeling  my  muscle  to  see  if  I 
am  up  to  doing  it,  thus  far  with  rather  discourag 
ing  responses  from  my  system.  Also,  I  am  torn 
between  the  ideal  aspect  of  the  theme  and  the 
stage  necessities  —  the  old,  old  problem.  Per 
haps  in  the  end  I  will  let  the  stage  go  to  ballyhoo, 
and  write  the  thing  as  I  see  it,  for  that  justly 
lighted  and  managed  stage  of  the  mind,  where 
there  are  no  bad  actors  and  where  the  peanut- 
eating  of  the  public  is  reduced  to  a  discreet  mini 
mum.  But  this  —  after  all  —  is  an  uncourageous 
compromise.  .  .  . 

169 


SOME  LETTERS  OF 

[To  Henry  Miller] 

MESSRS.  BROWN,  SHIPLEY  &  Co.'s 

TRAVELLERS'  OFFICE. 
123,  PALL  MALL,  LONDON,  S.W. 

July  10,  '09. 
DEAR  MILLER, 

Your  friendly  telegram,  letting  me  know  the 
date  of  your  arrival  in  London  and  inviting  me 
to  be  present  at  the  opening  of  the  Divide,  reached 
me  yesterday.  I  have  been  meaning  to  write  to 
you,  to  tell  you  how  good  the  prospect  looks  to 
me  here  for  the  play,  also  to  apologize  to  you  for 
keeping  mum  at  Sky  Meadows  this  spring  con 
cerning  my  prospective  marriage.  The  reason  for 
my  keeping  quiet  was  —  of  course  —  my  desire 
to  prevent  any  inkling  of  the  event  from  reaching 
the  newspapers  before  we  were  safely  on  ship 
board.  Not  that  you  would  not  have  been  discre 
tion  itself  but  one  is  always  nervous  in  these 
matters.  As  it  turned  out,  our  precautions  seem 
to  have  proved  excessive,  with  the  result  that  my 
mail  swarms  with  inquiry  from  anxious  friends. 
Cards  of  announcement  after  the  fact  are  printed, 
and  will  I  hope  soon  comfort  these  troubled 
breasts. 

As  to  your  invitation  to  be  present  at  the  open- 
170 


WILLIAM   VAUGHN   MOODY 

ing  of  the  play,  it  greatly  tempts  me,  and  perhaps 
my  desires  will  prevail  over  my  prudence;  but 
the  fact  is  that  my  health  has  been  and  is  wretched, 
and  the  doctors  warn  me  that  if  I  do  not  take 
great  care  just  now  I  will  rue  it.  The  work  which 
I  did  on  the  Faith-Healer,  together  with  the 
excitement  attending  its  production,  came  too 
soon  after  my  typhoid  convalescence.  In  conse 
quence  I  broke  down  badly  after  reaching 
London,  and  have  been  extremely  ill  since,  with 
symptoms  of  typhoid  relapse  well  known  to  the 
doctors  and  very  grimly  regarded  by  them.  Now 
I  am  better,  and  gaining  steadily,  but  the  wise 
acres  say  that  the  only  place  for  me  —  for  a  year 
—  is  a  farm,  and  that  any  excitement  which  I 
allow  myself  is  at  my  peril.  Anyhow,  I  shall  be 
here  in  spirit,  and  I  cannot  help  feeling  that  the 
prospect  for  a  substantial  success  is  good,  in  fact 
excellent.  .  .  . 

With  earnest  good  wishes,  I  am 

Sincerely  yours, 

W.  V.  MOODY. 


THE  END 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U    .   S    .   A 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
BERKELEY 

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